Rating: 3/5
Review:
Quite good but could have been much better
This debut novel by A.K. Benedict involves time-travel, serial killers and some academic musings, especially in philosophy. It is reasonably successful but I have some reservations about it.
The plot is bizarre but interesting. I don't want to give anything away, so I will say only that a Cambridge academic becomes embroiled in a weird series of murders which turn out to involve time-travel. Benedict generally handles this well and, to her credit, makes the silly-sounding idea work. The plot swings into life early on and I enjoyed the first 100 pages or so very much, but I thought that things got tangled and messy and hence dragged rather in the middle of the book, and it could have done with some firm editing.
There are, as seems almost compulsory these days, multiple narrators. They all speak in the present tense which in a time-travel novel is probably just as well for clarity but did feel a little mannered to me. The prose is readable and the book is generally well written, but particularly the often mildly ironic tone of the central character, the philosophy don Stephen Killigan, did get a bit much at times. I could certainly have done without things like the description of a dawn outing beginning, "The sun is barely breaking wind under the duvet of clouds when we climb into the boat," the like of which crop up fairly regularly. I also found some anachronisms rather spoiled the atmosphere for me - saying "It's okay" in 1635, for example, or talk of banknotes in the same year (they weren't in use until much later) and so on. I don't want to nit-pick, but there was enough of this sort of thing to interfere somewhat with my enjoyment.
Good editing and some serious tightening up could have made this a very good book. As it is, I can offer only a somewhat qualified recommendation.
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