INKPOT'S BOOK PLEDGE 51-55

Here are the latest reviews from Inkpot - now over a third of the way to 150 books!

51. THE SECRET OF CRICKLEY HALL by James Herbert.
Gabe, an engineer, moves his family (wife Eve and two girls, Loren and Cally) to Crickley Hall for a couple of months while he works in the nearby town. Gabe and Eve are mourning the loss of their son Cam, who was abducted from a park a year previously. Crickley Hall has its own tragic past, as 11 evacuated orphans and their guardian all perished on the night of the big storm during the Second World War. Now it seems that the house is haunted by the ghosts of the dead and Eve won’t leave because she hopes to find a link to her missing son through the dead children.
Ok, this book is long – over 600 hundred pages – and stories of haunted houses should be scary, right? Well, er, not in this case. I expected more from the author of The Fog. I think a good editor could have brought this book down to 200 pages and it would have improved immensely. This was not my cup of tea.
2/10 Darren Shan Wannabe

52. THE EMPTY CHAIR by Jeffery Deaver
Once more top criminalist Lincoln Rhyme and top cop Amelia Sachs are collecting evidence and walking the grid to fight crime, except this time they are fish out of water in the backwoods of Carolina. Yet again Jeffery Deaver has produced an interesting, well written thriller which breathes new life into the formula.
7/10 Not bad.

53. HURIN’S CHILDREN by J.R.R Tolkien
You can not fault the works of Tolkien that were published during his life, but I have questions about his posthumous works, published by his son Christopher. Always a perfectionist, Tolkien worked on several different versions of this story (and a short version is included in the Simerillion) but was never finished one to his satisfaction. While there are parts of this tale that are brilliant, a lot of it is stilted and I can’t imagine Tolkien ever allowing it to print if he were still alive. The plot reads like a Greek tragedy with elves.
6/10 Curate’s Egg


54. ST MARGARET CLITHEROW by Margaret T Monro
A concise biography of an amazing martyr under the reign of Elizabeth 1st. An inspiring tale of an admirable woman and her trials and eventual death, as well as providing a snap shot into life in England at the time and the systematic eradication of the Catholic faith.
9/10


55. THE STONE MONKEY by Jeffery Deaver
This is the fourth Jeffery Deaver in the Lincoln Rhyme series. I really enjoyed the other three and I was expecting another exciting thriller with my favourite characters, Rhyme and Sachs, in this book, but I was disappointed. I suppose every author throws a dud here and there. This book is about human smuggling from China to America and involves Rhyme trying to hunt down a ‘snakehead’ (a human trafficker) before he kills the surviving passengers of a ship he blew up. I caught Lethal Weapon 4 on telly the other night, and the plot is pretty much the same except Murtagh and Riggs are slightly more entertaining. Apparently Deaver considers this to be his best Lincoln Rhyme book. Perhaps there is a lesson to be learned in this. The book that the author likes best is never his best book.
5/10 Readable.