Genre: Historical Thriller
This had promise but anything that takes me 9 days to read clearly has issues. (A book this length should have taken me 4 or 5 days). Granted, I put it down for 2 days to read something else, but that is a further damning indictment. So what went wrong? Well it was well researched and I definitely got a sense of time and place. But it moved too slowly and there were too many characters to keep track of. A cast list at the beginning would have been useful. As would have a timeline. Every few chapters are preceded by a date but these are meaningless unless you know the exact date of the abdication. So as a tension driver those section headings utterly failed. I was hoping the finale would save it (thus earning 3 stars at least), but the action peaked too soon and the original murder was not even solved. The ending went on far too long and the author went to great lengths to explain the fate of certain characters. Most of which I didn’t care about and the murder, which I did care about, was left to speculation. So the ending managed to be both boring and frustrating. A great idea, but a very patchy execution.
2/5
PS I think I will read the sequel though, it sounds good and another reviewer I trust said it was better than this first one.
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