My favourite book of 2002 so far - which isn’t a hard title to get as it’s the first book I’ve finished reading this year! It is a deserved title though and I’m looking forward to reading the rest of the series. As I read this book for a mailing list discussion group I’ll leave commenting further on how much I liked it until the discussion starts.

[on characters and setting]

I’m interested in both of the main characters. I think Kathy Kolla was a more roundly portrayed character in this book and we didn’t learn nearly so much about David Brock. I’m intrigued to see what happens next with this partnership as the pairing of a Scotland Yard inspector with a CID sergeant seems to have been on a one off basis for the case in this book. I’m wondering what gets them together again for book two. I really liked the way that they were brought together and how we didn’t learn about it until the second half of the book.

Overall I think Maitland didn’t do a bad job of characterisation, but I don’t think it was his strongest point. Some of the minor characters didn’t quite seem all there and I found Kolla a bit inconsistently written from time to time.

The setting definitely came alive for me. It came more alive in the second half than the first. Having the setting destroyed affected me quite powerfully. In the first half I couldn’t see the author setting up Jerusalem Lane for us so solidly and then tearing it down as we found out was planned. I was quite shocked when we found it as a building site at the beginning of the second half of the book.

With a different setting this would have been an entirely different story, the lane was definitely an essential part of the plot. That said I found myself thinking of the setting as being in other cities in the UK rather than London but I can’t quite put my finger on why I kept thinking that thought.

[on the plot]

I loved the time span of the plot. The six month gap really worked for me as did the fact that we discover that Brock had a different agenda and wasn’t really interested in Meredith’s death at all in the first half of the book. I think this accounts for some of the problems that Mike pointed out such as the police not following up on the Judith Naismith lead. I don’t think the police (other than Kathy) were particularly bothered in proving that Meredith’s death was a murder anyway.

The resolution was the weakest part of the book but I didn’t think it was terrible. I rolled my eyes a little at Kathy jumping off her sick bed to catch the culprit single handedly but it didn’t wreck the book for me. For me it was the opposite of what Maddy said: the plot all the way along was good enough that I didn’t reduce my rating to account for the weaknesses of the ending.

[on the best and worst scenes]

When I first saw this question I had trouble thinking of stand out scenes but everything that everyone else has mentioned has had me nodding and thinking that I liked it too. I liked the book as a whole and there wasn’t really anything in it that didn’t work for me. I agree that it’s a bit of a cliche to have the female half of the partnership chucking herself into danger at the finale but this worked for me because I felt it was more Kathy Kolla’s book than David Brock’s and so it seemed reasonable, if not very sensible, for her to be the one taking chances rather than him.

[on the first in a series]

It didn’t feel like the first book of a series to me and that’s a good thing because it means I think that Maitland avoided making it too formulaic. I liked the fact that we didn’t get given tons of background information on the characters straight off, I’m looking forward to finding out more about them as we go on. I wonder if Maitland was planning on making Kolla and Brock a partnership when he wrote this book, I presume that something must happen in the later books to bring them together on a permanent basis.

[in summary]

I’m looking forward to reading the rest of the series very much. I really liked this book and want to know more about the central characters and hope that Maitland can keep up the quality of the plots and the backgrounds. I’m having trouble keeping myself from picking up the second book but I don’t want to have forgotten it by the time the discussion comes around again.