The Burning Court

Rating:
Summary: Excellent. Carr's finest.
Review: Great story. Besides being a superb locked-room mysterey, the atmosphere and the mood are perfectly chilling.

Rating:
Summary: Ambiguous and Dubious
Review: Opens in stunning fashion with the hero discovering a photograph of his wife, cited as the Marquise de Brinvilliers, in a book of famous poisoners. Following the suspicious death by arsenical poisoning of a neighbour and the vanishing of his corpse from a sealed granite crypt, he becomes convinced that she is a witch risen from the dead. Carr makes this bizarre plot quite convincing through an atmosphere which relies far more on understatement than it does on the thick effects of the Bencolins (or even Hag's Nook). Unfortunately, Carr follows a highly logical and quite convincing plot with a supernatural one that makes nonsense of the other, yet, owing to references made in later books, impossible to credit, making the reader uncertain of what to believe. Thus is a good story and considerable ingenuity tossed carelessly out the window.

Rating:
Summary: Ambiguous and Dubious
Review: Opens in stunning fashion with the hero discovering a photograph of his wife, cited as the Marquise de Brinvilliers, in a book of famous poisoners. Following the suspicious death by arsenical poisoning of a neighbour and the vanishing of his corpse from a sealed granite crypt, he becomes convinced that she is a witch risen from the dead. Carr makes this bizarre plot quite convincing through an atmosphere which relies far more on understatement than it does on the thick effects of the Bencolins (or even Hag's Nook). Unfortunately, Carr follows a highly logical and quite convincing plot with a supernatural one that makes nonsense of the other, yet, owing to references made in later books, impossible to credit, making the reader uncertain of what to believe. Thus is a good story and considerable ingenuity tossed carelessly out the window.