This book was my choice for book club. I wasn't sure what to suggest this year so ended up picking this. I first read it about twenty years ago, maybe longer. It was definitely when my dad was still alive and he died in 2008. He read it first when we were on holiday in France I think, and he liked it so much that he made my mum and I read it too. I absolutely loved it at the time but have never reread it. I thought it was an interesting choice for book club as we don't tend to read a lot of crime, and I thought it would be interesting to read it now I'm 42, not in my late teens or early twenties as I was before.
The book is one of a series about an ex police detective called Cliff Janeway. He now works as a book dealer and he's minding his own business doing that one day when an ex colleague arrives in his shop. This colleague is now like a bounty hunter, returning those who have skipped bail and cashing in on it. He has a new person he's chasing. She's called Eleanor Rigby and she's a young woman who's skipped bail. Janeway is intrigued because of the connection to books - there have been ashes of books left behind after robberies that Eleanor has been arrested for, and Janeway wants to know why.
He sets off in pursuit of her and ends up in Washington or Oregon, one of those places. I think. It's a while since I read this so the details are a bit fuzzy. Anyway she's been all over the country and there are dead bodies, too, so if it was Eleanor then she is also wanted for murder. I can't fully remember. But Janeway captures Eleanor and then they spend a nice twenty four hours together scavenging rare books and teaching each other some lessons. He then decides to take her back to her family farm and meets her parents and her uncle. There's definitely a frisson of something sexual between them even though, as Janeway points out to himself, he's old enough to be her dad.
So the books that have been left in ashes at crime scenes. Eleanor's dad used to work for the Graysons. They were a pair of brothers who had a printing press. Darryl Grayson was proud of his work and was very exacting about it. He printed a copy of The Raven by Edgar Allen Poe and there was a mistake in it, way back in 1949, and he was haunted by it for twenty years. The brothers died in a fire in 1969, a fire that took their entire workshop and everything else up in smoke. But Janeway finds that there were rumours that there was a new copy of The Raven, without the mistake. The rumour goes that Darryl sent it out to his subscribers, first of all, but that he was going to do a proper print run but then he died, and couldn't. Janeway suspects that the ashes of the books left at the crime scenes were copies of this new version of The Raven.
These parts of the book are all fine, and interesting, but it gets bogged down in detail at about two thirds of the way through. There are people after Eleanor and it all gets a bit stupid and there's too many characters and it's hard to wade through. But I did enjoy the main story. I think most people at book club agreed with me.
In all I'm giving this sort of three and a half out of five - not quite a four but it was nice to reread something that I read so long ago and that I shared with my dad. I'm not sure I would read any others in the series, though!
No comments:
Post a Comment