mystery puzzle-piece-threads pulled throughout the story
581947
I liked the mystery puzzle-piece-threads pulled throughout the story.

I wish the author would have had someone else, besides the newly grieving husband,  describe in detail-  the women at which he was looking. It was disconcerting to me. I just skimmed ahead.

I finished the book because the author created the curiosity-connection for me to want to see those mysteries solved.
2825202
As mysteries go this one was not well constucted as there are arbitrary devices in place only to move the mystery aspect.
2094412
This book is a puzzle: totally intriguing and engrossing until the very end at which point it absolutely falls apart. I don't think I have ever read such a disappointing ending. Why did you do that Ms Costeloe, did you become bored with your novel? It needs two more chapters at least: one showing how the 4 year old twins got to England unaccompanied on the kindertransport and one showing how Ruth got out. And Helga deserved more than a sentence merely telling the reader she died. How? When? Who took care of the twins afterward? How did Edith arrange things afterward? The detail in the rest of the book was precise and convincing and then you simply let your novel fall apart. I would have developed the German character Peter as a vehicle for helping the twins and Ruth get out. But-you needed something! I gave the book three stars but would have given it five if you had written an ending with the same energy and detail as the rest of the book.
1028659
It looks like a jigsaw puzzle. Because author disregard the sequence of narration, we have to recover it in our brain. It belomgs perhaps to one of most difficult novels.
3166294
Set in a world in a time-period where firearms are still in their early stages, this murder mystery is an unusual story.  A murder that is apparently passionate and yet pre-meditated in a xenophobic and remote seaside town reminiscent of the ones in H.P. Lovecraft's works promps the distant capital to send out Detective Allison Newberry.  She has to pursue various unhelpful and often confusing leads in this town hostile to outsiders.  She begins to unearth elements of bizarre rituals and strange stories that may or may not be linked to the murders.  It is up to her to determine what is really going on, if there is a cover-up and who is responsible in this murder thriller. Readers familiar with Lovecraft will recognize elements from his stories.  The story is well-written and will have you wanting to know what is going to happen next.  Pet peeve:  The author seems to confuse "purposely" and "purposefully"- a common mistake but one that one would expect the editor to catch. There are also a few typos/ misspellings like "alter" instead of "altar".  This is not a chronic problem in the book nor a prominent feature.
2504987
This book had flashes of brilliance embedded in an uneven story. The plot follows Billy and Mona, young editors at a dictionary whose jobs include defining and updating words, fielding correspondence from wingnuts, and apparently, working  in a classic cube-farm environment. They stumble upon a mystery buried in citation cards and work together to solve it.

At times I became absorbed in the story, and I found it very interesting how the pieces of the mystery fit together.  However, the author seemed to be trying to juggle too many things at once.  There was the mystery itself, but then there were over-arching issues for Billy and Mona that seemed to come out of nowhere, and to my thinking, did little to add to the story.

I have to say that I found the process of how words in the dictionary come into being very interesting, and the author seemed to be at her best when describing this and the funny things that happen along the way. It did strike me that the book might be of most interest to the `teen reader' category. Overall, it was a pretty good read but was too uneven for any accolades.
874363
The Waters & The Wild by DeSales Harrison is a recommended mystery - for the right reader.

First Father Nelson Spurlock has a young women visit him, looking for something her father may have sent him. Later Spurlock receives through the mail the confession, of sorts, from a man he doesn't know. The writer is Daniel Abend, a psychoanalyst and single father living in New York City and father of a teenage daughter, Clementine, the young woman who must have been Spurlock's visitor. Abend apparently had an affair years earlier with a woman in Paris, presumably the mother of his daughter. When one of his patients commits suicide, Spurlock delivered the eulogy, which is what brought the man to Abend's attention. After this death, however, his daughter disappears and Abend begins to receive threatening messages, which lead him to examine his past.

While the writing is beautiful in this novel and the mystery is intriguing, the presentation and the prose overwhelm the plot. The beginning starts out strong, but after that the sheer barrage of language eliminates some of the pleasure of following the twists and turns of the story. The narrative mostly moves along at a crawl and I began to lose patience with the florid language of the prose and snail's pace of the plot. It must also be said that at times it was difficult to follow which character was talking as they weren't presented from the start as unique individuals.  At the conclusion, it is an interesting story but, for me, a struggle to finish. 2.5 rounded up for the right reader.

Disclosure: My review copy was courtesy of the Random House Publishing Group.
3321940
This book has intricate designs, but there are places where things don't seem to match up.  It would be more satisfying if, when following threads or patterns, they did connect with each other.

If you're not that detail-oriented (or can overlook it), this won't bother you.
304406
There are glimpses of a good story here, but they are lost in the droning noise of the day to day details of the characters' lives.  In some books, if a scarf were to fall to the ground, it would be foreshadowing of things to come.  In this book, it is a simple observation that a scarf has fallen to the floor.  The day to day tedium detracts from the story rather than enhancing it.  Additionally, the story jumps in a few places, leaving one scratching their head.  One example is where the crow is in the character's head, seeming to want to show him something; yet, when the character stumbles upon something by himself, the crow is angry.

Perspective in the story is another failing.  It is told from a limited set of characters' views, mostly, yet the reader is given the feelings and motivations of other characters, even though you get nothing else from them other than an outside view.  Additionally, there are problems with tense; at times attempting to tell the story from present tense, lapsing into past-tense, and vice versa.

Lastly, the story needs some good, old-fashioned proof-reading.  This would expose these and other issues, and set the stage for a rewrite.  This is not ready for prime-time.

Sorry, but I couldn't finish this story, and am moving on.
2175353
A couple of intriguing mysteries that leave you wondering whats next
863073
Thread to help the hunt move forward.
A twist of the story leaves a clue where the rest of the story goes
3462151
It seems to follow a mix of Hercules Poirot/Sherlock Holmes kind of structure. Lots of small bits of traces and hints here and there for the main character to fit together in solving a mystery in line with: the murder in the closed room.

However - as a reader you don't really get absorbed in thise slow and endless uncovering of bits and pieces. We have to wait untill very last with an answer - which could be ok, if only we were provided a little suprise or suspense now and then.

So - quite boring, good if you need to fall asleep quickly though!
3626290
I started this book at the 5 star level and then wound my way down to 2 stars, ending at 3 because the ending somewhat rescued the book for me. The prose is indirect, poetic and oblique and you have to strain not to miss a cue, which I did not mind, but the fractured shifting of viewpoints irritated me after awhile, especially when many of the characters' back-stories had to be accounted for. I began to lose track of who's back story was who's, until they all came full circle and the present story got underway.

When a story is fragmented so much(some point-of-view sections were less than half a page long) in order to keep the reader guessing, one wonders whether the core story itself had much intrinsic drama in it. And how often can the author open each section in the present story and immediately take her characters back into the past to fill in the holes in that tapestry that she herself has decided to render to us in fragments?
I've come across books like this increasingly in the last couple of years, and wonder if this seems to be an emerging style - the patchwork quilt variety. It makes me wonder what happened to the art of telling a story - to the art of going from A to Z sequentally and gripping your reader all the way, rather than jump all over the alphabet and finally arrive at Z to have your reader ask you - "are we there yet?"

Shane Joseph [...]
2553873
Okay, the author still has a tendency to get too wrapped up in the world he is creating--mostly with long-winded and repetitive descriptions of things that really aren't needed. Details on building devices and mundane layouts of villages and such, all tend to slow the flow of the story and get tedious at times. This book didn't do it as much as the second book in the series, and it may have just been my copy--but it seemed as if certain portions of the book were just copied and pasted...because I was reading the same material in a couple of chapters.
Still, I find myself curious as to how the story will eventually end. How will the time travel paradox be resolved? Can it be?
One strong recommendation I would give this writer--limit your desire to over explain. Less is more, and readers don't need the (boring) details of mixing cement or how many times someone struggled to learn, build or perfect a thing. That is a given ... or should be.
Stick with the characters and let them 'tell' and 'show' us the story. Quit over explaining.
3253661
A fun but somewhat typical thriller-mystery-page turner surrounding the big questions of who Jesus and Mary Magdalene really were, and what is the Holy Grail. The biggest problem for me was the fact that Dan Brown literally interwove facts with theories and fiction; I didn't know what was true or not, or even if the book itself was considered fiction or not. An example was when the author exclaims that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene, and that the Roman Catholic Church tried to conceal this 'fact' by portraying Mary as a prostitute and Jesus as a virgin. Is this truly a fact, simply a theory, or a piece of fiction that Dan Brown is well aware of? Some of the author's claims I can just assume are incorrect, such as to what the Grail supposedly is, or that the person to the right of Jesus in Da Vinci's The Last Supper could be one of several people. But should a mystery book really make you constantly question the supposed given facts?

The book is about the murder of the well known curator of the Louvre, who in his last moments alive creates a secret message to his granddaughter, Sophie Neveu and a Harvard professor of religious symbology, Robert Langdon. After solving the message, the two are brought on a trail of clues to where and what the Holy Grail is. The story also mixes together the big questions with, of course, the genius of Leonardo Da Vinci. Not only does it include some of  his paintings, but his famous drawing, The Vitruvian Man, and his 'supposed' never finished invention called the cryptex, a portable vault. Being interested in Da Vinci, I really like the concept of a mystery that includes his work. Dan Brown adds a side of romance as revealed at the end. I couldn't help but think that ever since the Harvard professor described Sophie as attractive, the two of them ending up dating was completely inevitable. As for the mystery of who "The Teacher" was, towards the end it became clear that there were only so many options for his identity to be climatic, despite the clues that had threw me off, kind of like a Scooby Doo episode. The real mystery of the book is of course the Holy Grail.

Overall, I liked the book. Despite it's flaws, It is a fun, fairly simple read. As almost anyone who has read it will tell you, it is hard to stop reading; It seemed like there was always a compelling mystery on the verge of being solved just as I wanted to put the book down. The ending is satisfying enough, something that you would definitely hope for after such a treasure hunt. The whole concept of the 'truth' of Jesus and Mary Magdalene is very interesting plot compared to a typical mystery, the book's enigma is based around a huge and puzzling question. In addition, Dan Brown incorporates pieces of Da Vinci's work, making the story even more interesting. But as absorbing as the book is, it seemed like a lot of what I was fascinated from it was fiction.  Overall, I'd give the book a three and a half out of five, as in a seven out of ten.

Ray Mullin
530946
hole in plot  a major character seems to have very little reason for his/her behavior
4162095
This book was a puzzle of pieces which were all bound beautifully together at the end. I did not find the main character very sympathetic, but he was intriguing enough that I would like to know more and would certainly continue reading more of the series.