Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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32 of 36 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Atmospheric golden age style thriller, 28 Jul 2009
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Programme (What's this?)
The setting is Cornwall summer 1935 and Josephine Tey the crime writer is on holiday at the invitation of her friend police Inspector Archie Penrose. Before Tey even arrives, a local man has been killed in a riding accident and a local boy is missing. Soon after another tragedy occurs at the scenic Minack Theatre and Penrose is asked to investigate this murder.
This novel has recreated the golden age of crime fiction writing with a very contemporary feel. The writing is polished, very descriptive and atmospheric with full rounded characters which are flawed and very real. Cornwall itself is a major character here and the beauty of the Cornish landscape is conveyed here in breathtaking prose.
The main theme running through the book is relationships. The characters relationships with each other and even with the geographic landscape in which they were born drive the plot.
This novel is a tribute both to the golden age of crime writing and Cornwall. I haven't read the novel previous to this, but I don't think it's necessary. This novel will work as a stand alone but I will be seeking out the first novel and look forward to more in this series.
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13 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
The age may be golden, but the writing is bronze, 15 Aug 2009
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Programme (What's this?)
While far from an expert on what is being bandied about as 'The Golden Age' of British writing, I personally felt that this may have been set in that period but there was little else to feel that it was connected to it. The writing style, in particular, only rarely felt authentic and for the most part 21st century - in other words, Golden Age writing only really works if it is written during the same era in which it is set, or at least closer to it than 70-plus years later as it is in this case. The descriptions of Cornwall, where the novel is set and with which I have some personal experiences, were too occasional and erratic to enable the reader to 'see' and feel a part of the environment that is being described. But the over-riding impression for me was that it was just plain boring! I accept however that fans of this genre might feel very differently - I am just making observations as an outsider looking in, someone with a preference for contemporary crime fiction.
If you analyse the writing and detach yourself from the story, it's not difficult to find evidence of what I consider to be a rather amateurish style. It most clearly manifests itself in some of the dialogue between the characters and is quite unlike anything I have seen before. The dialogues are often relatively long, on occasion a single speech will take up more than a complete page and a conversation the best part of a 20-page chapter, and this becomes tiring (to me). But more to the point, I constantly found myself unaware of who was saying what, because the style of this particular writer is one that often precludes the mention of who is speaking, or leaves very large gaps in between. As a result, and also because almost all the characters sound the same and have no real identity expressed via speech, I found myself going back through the page - and sometimes to the page before - to remind myself who was talking and who was saying what. When Josephine has conversations with Archie, they both talk the same way, with similar sentence structure, similar phraseology and, if we could actually listen, similar accents. Top-class authors have skills which include the subtle variation of speaking styles among all leading characters such that the reader instinctively knows who is talking without any need for the "xxxxx said" insert.
The story is, it has to be said, pretty convoluted, full of twists and turns and includes everything but the kitchen sink in its efforts to pack in every sexual deviancy known to the people of 1935 Cornwall. But after a while these relentless revelations of past and present secrets become a little tiring and undermine the fundamental point - unless of course you love hearing about a close-knit community with dark, dark secrets stretching back entire lifetimes that everyone knows about but nobody talks about. Ultimately the story pivots on one specific surprise, except it wasn't a surprise at all and could have been predicted from page three. The characters are mostly uninteresting despite their extraordinary histories, in the sense that I found it difficult to care for anyone in particular, be it like or dislike. Josephine is apparently the central character of this series but is utterly forgettable and devoid of any memorable personality. Several trees could have been saved by removing her character from the story, as she added very little of importance. In any case, the impression was that Archie Penrose was the central character, and even he was wafer-thin plain vanilla mediocrity. For some reason I found Jago Snipe one of the few characters to hold my interest, possibly because he didn't blurt out generations-old secrets at the drop of a hat as most of the others did.
I am sure that my inexperience of this genre of writing is evident, but if Agatha Christie comes from the same Golden Age then I would take her work every day of the week in preference. This is at least twice as long as it needs to be, with yawningly-long conversations that really add nothing at all in many cases, the prose is in the main misplaced for the era, the characters are bland and the story nowhere near as interesting as it could have been. And calling Archie 'Archie' when he's effectively off-duty and 'Penrose' when he has his figurative policeman's helmet on was yet another irritation, even if that is typical of this genre. I've read much worse than this but even bad books can make me angry, make me feel something emotive; this one just bored me to death.
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4 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Amateurish writing made bingo more exciting, 30 Aug 2009
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Programme (What's this?)
I did not like this book.
I took it with me on holiday, on a two-week cruise, and looked for any excuse to set it aside. I really only kept going with it because I had to review it for the Vine programme.
So, what was so bad? Apart from the unbelievable attempts to set it in the 1930s and the over-wrought, melodramatic revelations that other reviewers have noted, I must say that I nearly didn't get past the first chapter because the writing itself was so poor.
First of all, viewpoints shifted constantly. Second, the sentence structure was monotonous with poor pacing. Third, the main characters -- the Scotland Yard detective back home on holiday, and his crime-writing girlfriend from Scotland -- responded and reacted but didn't make anything happen themselves. In fact, they didn't even work out the mystery for themselves!
However, most unforgivable of all, the author insisted on telling instead of showing. This was most obvious with perhaps the only interesting character of an uninteresting bunch -- the supposedly half-wit teenager named Loveday. Constantly, we were reminded how she was a bit loopy in the head and living in a dream world, and yet, anytime the crime-writing girlfriend, Josephine Tey, spoke to her, Loveday seemed a more reliable witness than anyone else.
By the time I finally reached the end, I was bored by the entangled relationships experienced in that town, and had no empathy for anyone -- neither those left standing nor those who were otherwise dispatched.
It really was hard work, and I would not be interested in reading another book by this author until her writing style improves.
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