Reviews – Books: K
RATINGS KEY
0/5 – Terrible. Avoid this book at all costs.
1/5 – Bad. Only read it if you’re a truly hardcore fan of the author/topic.
2/5 – Okay. It’s not bad, but it’s not good either.
3/5 – Average. A decent one-time read.
4/5 – Good. Worth reading and worth buying.
5/5 – Excellent. One of my favorites; a worthy classic.
Kept by
4/5 | Reviewed 8.31.07
Never heard of this book before I plucked it off the New shelf at the library—and I’m surprised it was new to me, since it’s just the kind of book which I’m always looking to find: a Victorian murder mystery, laced with elements of Gothic horror and modern psychology. It seemed a bit overlong in parts, but the prose style more than compensated for that.
The Killings at Badgers Drift by Caroline Graham
4/5 | Reviewed 9.04.07
It’s a rule of mine that I’ll give any mystery series a chance; besides, this book has been recommended to me from at least two quarters. I finally checked it out from the library and started to read it … and had a damn hard time putting it down, too. As far as the mystery goes, it wasn’t terribly hard to figure out (but then, my mind does turn down sick and morbid channels). It was the writing that hooked me—Graham has a way of turning a phrase so that it’s perfectly descriptive and yet entirely original. I’m not inseparably attached to Sergeant Barnaby and his henchman, as I am to Inspector Morse or Sherlock Holmes, but I’m still quite impressed at the author’s choice of the quiet, rather dull sergeant as the main character—instead of slowing the story down, it turned the reader’s attention to the details of the mystery and offset the other (generally eccentric) characters nicely.
