Midnight Come

Rating:
Summary: WARNING! CANDIDATE FOR WORST BOOK EVER!
Review: 'Utterly engaging' screams the quote on the cover, then you notice it refers to a different book. Take that as a warning. Even the publishers couldn't find anything good to say about this effort.

Midnight Come is supposed to be a clerical whodunit, a murder mystery set within the religious community surrounding Canterbury Cathedral in England. For the first 20 pages or so, I thought the author might bravely be attempting to create the olde-worlde "gas and gaiters" style of this sort of fiction from the 50's. After 50 pages, I realised this book is purely a self-absorbed exercise in convoluted and precocious sentence construction and grammar, something that only my high school English master could have enjoyed. There are hardly any nouns without adjectives or verbs without adverbs, and more clauses and subclauses to most sentences than I thought possible. The result is pages covered with the most excruciatingly pompous language I've ever read. Needless to say, I couldn't read much of it.

The characters! The ex-military intelligence man, now a senior church official, with the "jolly hockey sticks" wife, curiously confined to a wheelchair after polio contracted soon after their marriage. The cardboard cutout Deans, vicars, etc., could have leaped out of a Trollope novel. The token Australian, a young, arachnophobic, woman archictect, was so stereotyped, she only just stopped short of "throwing a shrimp on the barbie" (maybe she did, I gave up after 80 pages).

The dialogue! There is not one single person in this world who would ever utter the words put in these character's mouths. "'I'm afraid', she said, dropping her gaze, 'that I suffer a little from arachnophobia.'" As an Australian, I *know* she would have said 'I bloody HATE spiders!', and her gaze wouldn't have dropped an inch.

Do yourself a favour and read something (anything) else. This has only got one star because I couldn't save it with none.