"Perhaps the liveliest of Kate's four appearances (Oxford Exit, 1995, etc.), though the cast is skeletal (both collectively and individually) and the windup is a letdown."
Always on the alert for a new subject for one of her historical novels, Kate Ivory is rapt by the recent discovery of diaries and letters by Maria Taylor, sister of Dickens inamorata Ellen Ternan.
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"Mystery and characters alike generate so little interest that the burden of entertainment falls heavily on the culprit's confession, which reads a little too calculatedly like a classroom exercise."
Somebody (more than one somebody, actually) has been lifting rare 19th-century sensational novels from Oxford's Bodleian Library and wiping out all traces of their existence from the library's computerized catalogue.
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"Despite a nice eye for the absurdity of suburban rituals, Stallwood (Deathspell, 1992) leans a little too hard on repeated doses of those old standbys—blackmail and adultery; her sketchy characters barely cast shadows."
Inoffensive Rose Smith has a problem: her estranged husband Theo has kept half the collection of memento mori enamel boxes that her well-heeled aunt gave them as a wedding present—and that she now expects to see on her next visit.
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"Overlong and insufficiently creepy, but once the focus is off bad-seed Tess, the plot heats up with some rather deft adult complications."
A short story stretched to novel length in this British author's tedious debut—all about ten-year-old Tess's loathing of stepdad Malcolm, who wants her sent to boarding school; her hatred of her three stepbrothers, particularly the sadistic Joe; and her fervent wish for life to be as it was when she and her sister and her mom lived with daddy.
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