Can he and his friends save society’s victims? That is the question, and I cared. Hew is too humane for his profession of the law. When I say it’s toe-curling – I had a real sense of horror, the more so because she can be understated – it’s not one of those ‘nasty, brutish and short’ books, but about a struggling humanity. Who did what just isn’t what matters I’m a bad guesser at mysteries and didn’t foresee much it was a story about the university, and the kirk, and the society of St Andrews and it was well-ended. In short I’ll read anything written like this, mystery or whatever. It’s like a milder dose of what Robert Low did in The Lion Wakes (also very Scottish). She does a shifting point-of-view that textures the novel, that makes people come alive – she enters their consciousness, and when they’re in an extreme experience, her impressionistic writing can get it across. I notice in the author biography she did postgrad study in seventeenth-century prose she knows how to write the sixteenth century into her sentences – without being difficult, but with an authenticity achieved. ![]() I’ll go on with my Shardlakes but I found this one even more effective, and Hew Cullan has jumped the queue. Here I am in 16th century Scotland, in a novel written first to evoke time and place, with a gritty detailed realism, that stands your hair on end. Inescapably I thought of the Matthew Shardlake mystery I read last year – lured by what I’d heard of its dirty streets of 16th century England, C.J.
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