nocto

I was completely unsure as to whether this trilogy was going to be my cup of tea or not. I'm not much of a fantasy/science fiction type of reader really (well, all fiction is fantasy I suppose, what I mean is that I mostly like my characters to stay bound by the same limits that I am I guess, even though they mostly don't even when they inhabit the same universe I do, I could stay here in parentheses all day and talk about this, let's get out...) and though i've heard from numerous sources that these books were very good I've been reserving judgement and I only tentatively jumped into this one to test the water. Now I'm racing back to the bookshop to pick up the next two volumes as this was exceedingly well written and an excellent story.

On the one hand it feels like it's only a children's book on the surface, there's no let up on vocabulary for instance and there's no soft soaping of all the emotional issues in the story for a young audience. On the other hand I think it works because it's intended as a children's story, there's a level on which the emotions and soul churning violence wouldn't work as well in an adult book. The themes covered are enormous and I felt that the story takes place in a universe different to our own in order to enhance it's applicability to our own universe rather than just so the author can have free rein.

The ending is great, we complete a story but open up another can of worms for another book, just like the first book of a trilogy ought to end.

Purchased on 2nd November 2003.

Magic stuff. I forget how good a writer McCrumb is between books. She weaves history and culture and the real past together with a fictional present and comes up with unputdownable stories that become tales not just of a few characters but of the whole society of Appalachia.

This is the story of what happens when old man Randall Stargill is dying and his four sons and their partners gather at the family farm in the mountains to carry out his last wish, to build him the rosewood casket of the title. It's much less of a mystery than the earlier books in the series have been but it's the best imagined story of the series yet.

Purchased on 13th February 2003.

A copy of this book is available on BookMooch.

Short and sweet, but really pretty well executed. A detective story that does exactly what is says on the tin and clears the reading palette after something rich like the Hill I just read. Not an author I've come across before but one I'll certainly try again. A very neat story about mazes and light shows and goats in cathedral closes.

Borrowed.

This book has really knocked this series over the edge from relatively realistic seeming detective novel into wild flights of fantasy type of story telling. In many ways it's totally silly, but Hill keeps an edge of realism about it, and I love it.

Throughout Hill's books there have been many cases of appropriately named characters and nicknames that tie in with the plots but none more so than here. This is a long book and at times it felt like the plot was a bit too obvious and really it was all an excuse for five hundred odd pages of fun with words and riddles. But what's ace is that while there might be a hundred clues that you see through and you perhaps find a bit transparent and you wonder what the detectives are up to not seeing them all, what you see as the reader (or as this reader anyway) is only the tip of the iceberg of the clues and convolutions that are actually in the book. The ending a pleasure to read as you groan about all the things you managed to miss along the way.

A summary of the story is pretty short: a serial killer is knocking off victims with no apparent logic and writing 'dialogues' about the killings, these turn up at the local reference library. This simple idea makes for a really fascinating story, sometimes a bit comic book like but overall it works really very well.

I'm making myself wait to read the next installment of this series because I don't want to overdose on it. This was great and I hope the next book is just as good.

Purchased on 7th August 2003.