Tag: mystery

The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield

Diane Setterfield’s The Thirteenth Tale is a treat for book lovers everywhere. It’s a present-day gothic novel with rich characters, family secrets, and cunning stories.
Margaret Lea is an avid reader, especially of old novels and journals. A bookseller’s daughter, she practically grew up in her dad’s antiquarian bookstore, and dabbles in writing biographies of people long dead, people who come alive in the books she reads.

One day she receives a letter from Vida Winter, a famous yet reclusive writer whose life is shrouded in mystery — all the existing accounts of her life are different yarns she has spun at her whim. She has never told the truth about her life, until now, when she decided to contact Margaret to write her biography.

Margaret has never read Vida Winter’s work, and she is hesitant. She searches the bookstore’s shelves for a first edition of Vida Winter’s book, Thirteen Tales of Change and Desperation. She reads the book and is gripped by the first twelve tales, and when she turns the next page, she discovers that the thirteenth tale is missing.

Determined to find out about the thirteenth tale and the truth to Vida Winter’s life, Margaret Lea decides to accept the project. Vida Winter tells Margaret a haunting tale about an estate in the moors, twin girls, a governess and a ghost. As the dying author’s story unfolds, Margaret’s own family secrets surface, and she comes face to face with the past that has always haunted her.

Very very interesting :)

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My copy: trade paperback (bought full-price at Powerbooks) upgraded into a hardcover with dustjacket (from the NBS hardbound sale)

My rating: 4/5 stars

The Patient’s Eyes by David Pirie

Sherlock Holmes is one of my favorite detectives (alongside Encyclopedia Brown, The Three Investigators’ Jupiter Jones and Nancy Drew). I was a big Sherlock Holmes fan when I was a kid, and I loved The Hound of the Baskervilles, which is why I got this book, because I thought it would be really interesting.

I wasn’t disappointed.

The first in the Murder Rooms trilogy, The Patient’s Eyes details how the young Arthur Conan Doyle was bored in med school and was all but ready to drop out when he met Dr. Joseph Bell (supposedly the real-life basis for Sherlock Holmes), a surgeon/teacher (moonlighting as the Edinburgh police’s secret weapon!) who took him on as his assistant (mostly to disprove his cynicism, making Doyle the actual Watson).

After a tragic loss (something which I feel would be explained in the succeeding books), Doyle moves away from Edinburgh to start over, shakily establishing the foundations of his medical practice. And then he meets a new patient, Heather Grace, who is suffering from an eye complaint, psychological trauma, and has a mystery stalker.

Fascinated by his new patient, he decides to call on Dr. Bell to help him solve the mystery terrorizing Heather Grace, before it’s too late… Who is trying to scare Heather Grace to death? The uncle with a massive collection of exotica (also her trustee)? The perpetually cheerful (or so it seems) almost-fiance? Or the unscrupulous doctor attracted to Heather Grace, who is smarting from Doyle’s “piracy” of his patient?

The novel skims over elements from the Sherlock Holmes stories, such as the Speckled Band, The Solitary Cyclist, and Wisteria Lodge. It’s a murder mystery that twists and turns with a lot of surprises, and really, at the end of the novel I was totally scared out of my wits that I shoved the book under the blanket because the cover was freaking me out.

Now, if only I can find copies of the two other books in the series…

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My copy: trade paperback, from the Powerbooks bargain bin

My rating: 4/5 stars

The Dante Club by Matthew Pearl


Another historical thriller (am such a sucker for these!)

The Dante Club is about a series of grisly murders committed at the same time Dante Alighieri’s Inferno was being translated into English by a group of prominent New England literary figures, namely Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, Oliver Wendell Holmes, George Washington Greene, and JT Fields (the group is known as The Dante Club, hence the title).

The murders are patterned after the different circles of hell in Dante’s Inferno, and the Dante Club must figure out who is behind the dastardly deeds or else lose the chance to introduce the writings of Dante Alighieri to America before they complete their translation.

I discovered this book a few years ago, when I interviewed Ces Drilon and she recommended it to me. The writing is old-fashioned and dragging at times, or maybe it’s because male authors focus on different (er, boring) things.

I also wish I’d waited for my schedule to free up before actually plunging into the novel because it’s the type that’s best for uninterrupted reading. Except I also had to stop reading it at night because given that the “Lucifer” (aka, serial killer) was patterning his murders after the circles of hell, it got pretty scary.

Canticle Three (it’s divided into Canticles), is particularly exciting, but I’ll have to stop now before I say anything more. Bottomline, it’s a good blend of fact and fiction, one that will keep you on your toes.

I still have to read The Poe Shadow, I have the hardback on my to-be-read shelf…

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My copy: mass market paperback bought at Powerbooks, upgraded into a trade paperback mooched from the US (or was it Canada? I forget…)

My rating: 3/5 stars