Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Compelling, addictive and beautifully written, 25 Nov 2008
I took this novel on holiday and ended up walking around the apartment with it, bumping into furniture. I put it down to sleep and to eat, and that's about it. I became horribly unsociable until I'd finished it. I then couldn't, in a home full of books, find one other I wanted to read. Because although I'd closed Ghostheart, the story and the characters hadn't left me.
Roger Ellory's talent in creating real humans, with all their loves, fears, complexities, cruelties and dark corners, is one of the joys of reading his work. I don't know who I'm going to meet next, and I start each one of his novels curious to get to know new people. I may loathe them, they may make me shudder, or I may even, as with this one, fall in love with them. I always remember them. Jack Sullivan, Annie's irascible, booze-soaked but golden-hearted neighbour who adores her, is a wonderful creation.
I found the character of Annie quite entrancing, I could identify with her loneliness and her searching, and I wanted her to find who she was looking for. Will it be the seductive but elusive David Quinn?
There are some teeth-rattling horrors in Ghostheart, which haven't left me either, starting at Auschwitz and moving forward into the brutal gangland world of America in the 50s and 60s. All of it has the raw stench of authenticity which made it both difficult, and compulsive, to read. I had to know what happened.
It all works beautifully together, and I loved it.
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9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Terrific read !, 6 Feb 2008
Loved it! This is the first book I've read by this author and from start to finish I was enthralled.
The main book is set in the present with another storyline running alongside spanning the years from Auschwitz to America in the sixties. The past and the present are both equally gripping.
A book full of vengence and betrayal - if you haven't read it yet, believe me it's worth reading!
I've already bought another two novels by this author and now have the tough choice of which to read first.
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14 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Memorable Manhattan mystery, 2 Sep 2008
Along with many others I have been investing in R J Ellory's back-catalogue in response to his hugely successful fifth novel A Quiet Belief in Angels. Ghostheart is his second novel, and again it is clear that he has a broad and diverse talent, because he has the unusual ability to tell a tale in a different style to all of his others whilst retaining his own indelible signature and personal identity. And this is such an intelligently written story that I felt tempted to read it all over again as soon as I had finished.
Essentially there are three men in the life of central character Annie O'Neill: her friend and neighbour Jack, her new lover David, and her late father Frank O'Neill. And although a huge amount of time is allocated to the two living characters, it gradually emerges that it is her father who is the most influential and who, indirectly, this book is all about despite his having died more than twenty years earlier, when Annie was about seven years old. It's a book about writing; Annie runs a small bookshop in a little lane off West 107th Street, Manhattan, and part of the inventory includes antique and classical publications that are dear to her heart. Despite this being the early part of the 21st century, Annie feels - as one suspects the author does, too - that she doesn't belong in the modern era in a literary sense, feeling a closer connection to the likes of Fitzgerald, Steinbeck and Hemingway than writers of the current time. An elderly man visits her shop with a tale of his own to tell, one which involves gangsters of a bygone generation and a tale that is narrated in occasional pieces within the main body of the story. Soon after Annie starts reading the letters given to her each week by the elderly man, she meets David and is quickly swept off her feet by him and enters into a passionate and blissful love affair. Meanwhile, she shares her rapidly changing life with her trusted friend and neighbour Jack Sullivan, a heavy-drinking Vietnam veteran and journalist nearly twice her age.
Through the eyes, mind and heart of a woman with little in the way of previous experience in matters of love and commitment, and who knows a lot less about her late father than she would like, the reader is taken on an odyssey of emotional traumas that encompass both the present and the past, with issues such as love, honesty, trust, heritage and revenge just some of the tests of spirit and resolve that Annie has to endure. Key among these is the drama of discovering that the past life she thought she knew is shockingly different in reality, and that she has been deceived by those closest to her for her entire life until now.
The realisation of the truth is told in minute detail, a revelation that covers almost the entire length of the novel, and while the reader might second-guess the outcome, or some elements of it, before Annie does, the conclusion is moving and narrated with great skill and sensitivity. This is a story that I will remember long after closing the final page, a tale expertly and convincingly told despite the preconceived objections some have apparently had, that a British writer should tell a story entirely based in America, and a man writing through the emotions of a woman. The open-minded will soon realise, as they most likely had done previously with other Ellory novels, that this is a storyteller of exceptional talent and diversity, and also that he is no one-hit-wonder by any means. A Quiet Belief in Angels may have been the one that everybody has heard about and read, but the truth is that everything that went before - including Ghostheart - is every bit as good.
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