enjoyed the mix of amazon explorer adventurer tale with homegrown Victorian loony tale
( )

1912 England and Sebastian Becker is employed by the Lord Chancellor's Visitor in Lunacy as an investigator, to determine the mental state of any wealthly person who might be considered insane. His latest employment takes him to Arnmouth to investigate Sir Owain Lancaster, but events interfere.
An easy-to-read, well-written mystery with some interesting characters. ( )

I very much enjoyed this novel! The characters drew me in, the settings and atmosphere were compelling and effective, the pace and tension were well-handled. It's an entertaining and powerful exploration of the relationship between perception and reality. Just about everything in this book was masterfully done - and I now have a new author to get into. I can't wait to read the rest of his work!

But there's the ending...

The challenge with any mystery story is to make the ending a surprise - but it also needs to be implicit in the rest of the story. You obviously don't want to make it too easy for the reader to predict who the murderer is, but it's best when the reader can look and back and see little clues that could have let them figure it out. That's a fine line to tread.

I don't feel that this novel tread that line well. It's the one area where I think it fails. I didn't see the actual whodunit part coming, not because I didn't pick up on the clues - but because there were no clues. It just came out of nowhere. You could get rid of the murderer's reveal entirely and it wouldn't have any effect whatsoever on the rest of the story. It felt arbitrary.

Actually, it felt irrelevant. I got to the end and found out that the murder mystery wasn't really that important to story after all.

It's a testament to the strength of the rest of the story (the actual important parts) that the irrelevant whodunit didn't diminish my enjoyment of this novel. But it is the reason I can't give it 5 stars. ( )

I really enjoyed this story. I liked the characters, even one of the baddies I quite liked to begin with. I loved the idea of a lunacy commission. Would read more by this author. ( )

Can't remember who recommended this detective mystery but I remember it was highly recommended.
I was disappointed. I love the authors writing style and the story really could have been better but it seemed to just lose momentum at the end and fizzle out like a dead firecracker (at least to me). I felt
Iike the author didn't have any concept of how he wanted the story to end and just tossed a coin and took the easiest way out.
As a result of this, I probably will not read anything further by ths author. ( )