Synopsis/blurb......
Love is a
battlefield. Who will get out of it alive?
Harry Duncan
Wood runs a hotel in the historic city of Bath with his beautiful young wife.
When he falls in love with Mill House, an old greystone farmhouse on the banks
of river Avon among the soaring hills of Somerset, and sets about moving his
family there, the first appearances of the cracks in the marriage take him by
surprise. Is his wife seeing another man? Duncan needs to get to the bottom of
the affairs for his own sanity. Sometimes, however, ignorance is bliss and will
also keep everybody alive.
Jac Wright is a published poet, a published author,
and an electronics engineer who lives in England. The Closet is the first in
Wright's collection of literary short fiction, Summerset Tales, in which Wright
explores characters struggling against their passions and social circumstances
in the contemporary semi-fictional region of England called Summerset, but with
an added element of suspense. The collection is published as a series of
individual tales (each tale complete and not serialised) in the tradition of
Charles Dickens' The Pickwick Papers and Thomas Hardy's Wessex Tales. The first
Summerset tale, The Closet, accompanies the first title in the author's
full-length literary suspense series, THE RECKLESS ENGINEER, published by Soul
Mate Publishing, New York.
I got this long short story and four chapter tease for the
author’s full length novel which is out soon, in a giveaway/competition draw on
Goodreads.
I enjoy broadening my reading horizons and like trying new
authors in an effort to keep things fresh in my reading. On this occasion, I
enjoyed the short story which was interesting without getting me fully engaged
or too concerned about how things ended. Perhaps the trouble with the shorter
form of telling tales is that you can provide a history and back story, but it’s
still difficult for the reader, or this one at least to make a leap and feel an
emotional connection to the characters. So while the end was fairly neat, the story
as a whole was akin to rubber-necking at a car crash. You watch, you wince, you
gasp.............and then you carry on with your life with barely a backwards
glance.
The brief chapters provided as a lead-in to The Reckless
Engineer, didn’t draw me in sufficiently to want to add the novel to my wishlist,
or for me make a date with my bookseller on publication day.
The author can write for sure, and will win a lot of
followers, but for my own personal preference the prose were a little bit too
flowery in places – especially the first few pages of The Closet.
3 from 5
Nice review. But this one does not sound like my type of thing.
ReplyDeleteTracy, thanks, I wouldn't put you off it, (if I hadn't already) but I couldn't wholeheartedly endorse or recommend it to be honest. Better stick with a McBain!
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