Glass of Time [Hardcover]

The Glass of Time is a terrific story. It's a mixture of a suspense thriller, a romance with a bit of detective work too. Dastardly deeds, a string of surprises all add up to a book that is hard to put down. It's a fine sequel to the author's The Meaning of Night in which some of the characters are first introduced. I enjoyed the earlier book, but think this sequel even better. It's written in the first person which gives an immediacy to the story. The pacy story with twists and turns reminded me of Robert Goddard's Painting the Darkness with a touch of Austen's Pride & Prejudice.

I loved "The Meaning of Night" and was thrilled to learn of its sequel The Glass of Time. It lived up to my high expectations and more.

In 1876, more than twenty years after the murder of Phoebus Daunt, Esperanza Gorst goes to Evenwood to become the lady's maid of Baroness Tansor, who inherited the estate disputed in "The Meaning of Night".

Esperanza is there, at the behest of her guardian, to uncover the secrets that Baroness Tansor has sought to conceal, and to set right a past injustice in which Esperanza's own closest interests are bound up.

A web of deception, lies, and worse, is steadily unwound and the story builds to a wonderful conclusion.

The construction is brilliant. A piece of information is introduced, and the next moment its validity called into question. Nothing is as it seems, and nobody can be trusted.

There is much detail and much more that I could say, but I won't because the book itself takes you on a journey with Esperanza and gives you just the right amount of information at just the right time.

The prose is lovely (though the Victorian style may not be to everyone's taste), the characters are wonderfully drawn and the depiction of 19th century England is wonderful.

You can work out some things if you have read The Meaning of Night but not everything and it doesn't spoil the journey through this book at all.

"The Meaning of Night" and "The Glass of Time" both work as stand-alone novels, but I firmly recommended reading both!

The Glass of Time is a sequel of sorts to The Meaning of Night. Set in 1876, twenty-two years after Meaning of Night ends, the book begins when Esperanza "Alice" Gorst goes to Evenwood to (ostensibly) become Baroness Tansor's lady's maid. In reality, she's been sent by The Powers That Be to spy on her employer, for reasons that Esperanza will not be told until later.

We first met Baroness Tansor when she was Emily Carteret, engaged to Phoebus Daunt, the poet who was murdered twenty years before The Glass of Time opens. She still harbors feelings for her former flame, however, and one of the things she has Esperanza do is read from Daunt's work. She also has Esperanza run mysterious errands into town, much to the suspicions of Evenwood's housekeeper. What unfolds is a web of deception, lies, and, yes murder--not much more than that about the plot I'll say, only because I don't want to give anything away.

The Glass of Time has been one of the books I've been anticipating the most this year, and it didn't disappoint. Cox's long-winded, Dickensian style won't be to everyone's taste, but I really like his mode of writing--it sucked me right in from start to finish. His prose is descriptive, and his characters unusual and interesting. In Esperanza, Cox finds a bright, fresh, and new way to tell the story of the Tansor family. Cox's depiction of Victorian England is never contrived, like so many books set in that period and written lately are--another thing I loved about The Glass of Time.

Another thing I thought was excellent was that Cox (for the most part) got rid of the fiction that this is a "confession" edited and annotated by someone else for publication, using the convention of using footnotes to explain various passages. The Glass of Time is therefore that much more readable, making it only about 580 pages (the same length its predecessor might have been without footnotes). The reader figures out a long time before Esperanza does what's really going on; but the fun of the book is following Esperanza's journey. "I couldn't put it down" is such a clichéd sentence, but in this case... I really and truly couldn't put this book down.

Although Cox mentions events that took place in The Meaning of Night in this book, it's not entirely necessary to read it beforehand; a newspaper "clipping" about 130 pages in recaps the bare-bones storyline of The Meaning of Night. However, I would strongly suggest reading that book at some point--aside from its footnote problem, it's just as good as its sequel.