[My comments are taken from a mailing list discussion and as such contain spoilers!]

[on the setting, characters]

Yes, the setting definitely came to life for me. I liked the setting in the first book but this one seemed a lot better. I’m not sure if Gur was consistent in the characters, I felt some things about Michael jarred a bit early in the book but I can’t remember what now. The characters didn’t quite flow smoothly from the first book but I thought this book was a lot smoother in itself.

I liked seeing more of Eli and Tzilla - oh that was it! - I didn’t remember Eli and Tzilla being married in the first book, did I just miss that entirely? I think I probably missed a lot in _The Saturday Morning Murder_.

Of the non recurring characters I really liked Racheli, the admin assistant who appeared early in the book but she wasn’t seen for a long time after that. I didn’t really like any of the suspects very much at all.

[on the plot]

Yes, the plotting worked for me. I think the strength of this story is the same as in the first book: that the motives and reasons behind the murders are tied very closely to the setting. For the rest of the series I’m going to expect that the crimes have been perpetrated not for the usual reasons of money or love (in most mystery stories anyway) but for reasons like poetry fraud that only make sense in the setting of the story.

I found the conclusion satisfactory though I did really like the idea of the two victims having killed each other. I really wanted Iddo to have killed Shaul before he went off diving, I think that would have been a neat plot device but it wasn’t to be.

[on scenes, pacing, setting]

I’m never any good at this question. The scene that sticks in my head is the one where they look at Iddo’s body on the beach, I found it really quite gory and a bit of a hide behind the settee scene which wasn’t what I was expecting from Gur.

I found this book much better paced, I was expecting to find it slow going but I ripped through the middle of it quite entralled by it all, which surprised me quite a lot.

The setting is pretty much the most important element in these books, they would be completely different if they were set in more open environments. I found the university setting much easier to drop into than the psychoanalysis setting of the first book and I also got more of a feeling for Jerusalem in this book.

[comparisons to earlier books, summary]

I definitely found this book stronger than the first and a much more satisfying read. I put off reading it for a while because I feared I might get bored with it but that was far from the case. The pacing was better, I found it easier to keep track of the characters and I enjoyed the peek into a different world given by the author.

Overall I’d probably rate the book somewhere about three and threequarters stars out of five and I hope the next book reads as smoothly as this one and not as jerkily as the first did.