‘He is the most dangerous
man I have ever met. He can turn his hand to any skill and charm the pages from
a book, the fur from a cat, the life from a man without once feeling remorse.’
Stephen Killigan is a newly
arrived lecturer at Sepulchre College, Cambridge. One evening he finds the body
of a young woman who has been missing, and informs the police, but when they go
and look for the body it has vanished. This is the start of Stephen’s
life-changing involvement with a most unusual serial killer, Jackamore Grass,
which will see him time travelling between the present day and the seventeenth
century in pursuit of the truth.
The narrative moves between
distinctive voices; first person accounts from Stephen and from the enigmatic
Jackamore, and the investigation into the murders by the hassled police
Inspector Jane Horne. This helps keep a good pace and maintains the reader’s
interest in all aspects of the events and the seemingly inexplicable crimes.
The investigation is made particularly intriguing as the usual methods of
detection are not always helpful in this case, when dealing with a criminal who
can slip away through time.
I was struck by the author’s
wonderful use of figurative language in this novel; phrases such as ‘the
wind has a knife to my throat and is pick-pocketing my bones’, ‘close up, his
teeth are yellow and lean against each other like drunks’.
The setting of Cambridge and the
surrounding Fens landscape provides much history and atmosphere, and many
secrets, all of which the author draws on and incorporates to good effect in
her tale.
There is much to admire and
intrigue in this debut novel. It crosses over several genres to offer us a
speculative thriller, complete with murder-mystery, police investigation, philosophy,
the aesthetics of murder, time-travel and magic. It’s inventive, haunting and
compelling.
Published by Orion on 14th February 2013
I originally reviewed this book for lovereading.co.uk. Thanks to them and to the publisher for sending a review copy of this novel.
The time-travel/magic element would usually be offputting for me but this does sound like a great book - one I will be definitely reading! Thank you for the review.
ReplyDeleteThanks very much for commenting Wendy. This was quite unlike anything else I've read recently, very inventive, and I don't normally go for time-travel type themes but this was interesting combined with all the other aspects.
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