I have read and enjoyed several Adam Roberts books (Bete is one of my all time favourites) and I didn’t realise that he is a Professor of 19th Century Literature at Royal Holloway, London University and a leading authority on the works of Charles Dickens. Most of his novels are kind of dystopian sci-fi or horror, and this one is more of a Gothic Mystery.
The world in which it is set is like the love child of Dickens and Conan Doyle and others and many of the characters are lifted from the pages of their novels: Ebenezer Scrooge, Vavasour Holmes (father of Mycroft and Sherlock), the Invisible Man, Charles Dickens’ Inspector Bucket, Macbeth and the parade of kings, Hamlet, the Middlemarch Serpent and more. (I copied that list from a Goodreads reviewer). It was fun spotting the characters, some of which I knew and other I just wondered about!
A series of ‘impossible’ murders happen and the main characters have to figure out whodunnit and how. I mostly really enjoyed it, although I did get a little bit bored at times. It reminded me a bit of the The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep by H. G. Parry that I listened to early last year, although in that book characters from Dickens and other classic novels appear in contemporary Australia (where the book is set).
Sarah Wray Writer 