the advantage of being the ‘best mystery writer in the english speaking world’ - as no less than three of the review quotes in this book tell me - is that you can persuade people to read about six chapters of a book before even giving them a hint as to what the mystery is. i can see that there is plenty of ground work laid in the beginning but if i hadn’t known the author or read the praise for this book would i have read this far?

something about this book just didn’t grab me. i just don’t know what it was. i was intrigued. i enjoyed it. i read on when i way too tired to read on. i thought the plot was clever. i think the writing was good. it was a good book. it just wasn’t good enough in some indefinable way. it wasn’t as good as i’d been expecting. maybe it was that i knew barbara vine was clever. i spent the whole book waiting for the twist in the tail. i knew there’d be a twist and though it’s contents were surprising, it’s actuality wasn’t a surprise. that it was unpredictable was predictable. there was something a bit slow about it. maybe it was a little too clever. too clever just for me, or too clever for it’s own good. i don’t know. i think i liked it. my final decision, as the saying goes, is maybe.

[curiously this book is really called asta’s book. i picked my copy up in a second hand book store in america and for some reason they changed the name of the main character for the american market. it wasn’t until i saw asta’s book on the shelf in waterstones (in the uk) that i realised that the names had been changed.]