London Bridges [Paperback]

There is much to satisfy here, for the book is primarily a "mystery" novel, but this mystery brings in archaelogy, religion, Ancient Greek culture, and medicine. The writer must have conducted a considerable amount of research into her topics in order to write so authoritatively about these subjects.

Her characters are well defined and believable and Jane Stevenson makes you feel you would like to know these people, and in some way, when you finish the novel you feel you do.

But most of all, the fine writing shines through this novel. This is literary fiction of the highest order, and will leave the reader with a sense of satisfaction. A book to remember, unlike so many others and now having discovered this author I'm going to read the first two books her new trilogy, Astrea and A Place to Remember.

Why? Not because I was desperate to discover the solution to a mystery - I zipped through it at top-speed trying to *find* a mystery. There is a murder in the book, and although many of the characters are in the dark much of the time, the omniscient third-person narrator is always keen to tell the reader exactly what is going on.

A bit too keen, in fact. The novel can't seem to decide whether it's a detective story, a grown-up thriller, a Famous Five book or a lifestyle novel. Because of this much of the main story - which is quite intriguing - is submerged in gushing, superfluous detail. Although Stevenson's characters are engaging, I'm not dying to know every last detail of their clothes, or from which furnishings store they bought their pine flooring. Neither do I need to be told in precise detail what is going on inside their heads. A particularly grim example:

"...But in his dreams and fantasies, the moments when his conscious control of his mind slackened, his feelings for her had gradually developed an emotional and sexual charge which he was not prepared to acknowledge even to himself....In his pain and anger, he was unwilling to believe that a young attractive girl could possess such a thing as a mind of her own."

Such psychologising is both pointlessly wordy ("pain and anger","such a thing") and ineffective. This is the age of James Ellroy, not George Eliot; we like to be shown, not told.

Adventure aside, what is London Bridges about? That's the real mystery. It's marketed by a literary publisher, and aimed at a discerning audience. It even claims descent from the work of Margery Allingham, the most literary of Golden Age crime writers. Allingham would, I think, be aghast at some of Stevenson's infelicities of style, structure and characterisation.

And yet...it's readable. Even though the central characters spend a lot of time nattering about irrelevancies, I became genuinely interested in what would happen to them. The main plot, when disentangled from the overgrowth of verbiage, is moderately absorbing even if its denouement seems ill-contrived.

The book (and I'm talking here about the whole published 'product' rather than just the novel) has two big problems. Firstly, it is aimed at the wrong market. Intellectual detective fiction buffs will find this a terrible come-down from Margery Allingham and Arturo Perez-Reverte. Secondly, like so many books published recently, it has been badly edited. In fact it's been hardly edited at all. Any blue-pencil wielder worth her salt would have binned a quarter of the book and turned the remains into an engaging novella...

It is immensely enjoyable and compulsive, although let down by a rather contrived Wacky Races-style ending.