FEATURED AUTHOR - Six-time BRAG Medallion Honoree, #1 Best-selling Historical Fantasy author Maria Grace has her PhD in Educational Psychology and is a 16-year veteran of the university classroom where she taught courses in human growth and development, learning, test development and counseling. None of which have anything to do with her undergraduate studies in economics/sociology/managerial studies/behavior sciences. She pretends to be a mild-mannered writer/cat-lady, but most of her vacations require helmets…
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Recent comments: User reviews
The narrative gets your attention at once and holds it till the last word.
This novel isn't even one of his most famous books but it's splendid.
Hornung knows how to create emotion and suspense with a seemingly plain word and how to get the most of a story, which grows and expands itself just when you think that's all there was to it.
A good intrigue, interesting characters, picturesque entourages. Impossible to stop reading.
The narrative is good-paced, though sometimes slows down a bit. The author has a curious way to manage the time: when the protagonist must spend two days waiting for some development, there are two or three pages of his reflexions and sensations: When he spends two weeks travelling, you get four pages of reflexions and sensations. But they read well, never get boring.
The rest of time you get a very aptly constructed action, with good suspense.
The final is a perfection, very well rounded, it leaves you a sensation of great satisfaction, of a time good spent/employed.
The investigator is too superhumanly omniscient, allmighty and infallible, and, in the same time, is devoid of any human traits, though in the last chapter he falls in love. As a result, you can't like him.
Also, all his exploits advance in a straight line, he never encounters any obstacle.
The language is very cultured but lacks in elegance and smoothness.
While the first chapters invite some curiosity, the last ones are frankly booring.
Curious, original, comical, lets you pass some pleasant hours.
Narrated with a good rhytm, pleasant personages. The story is curious and sweet, modernly fast-paced and very Victorian in its spirit.
Then I began to read it and couldn't stop. It's not at all sci-fi, it could be real and its main attractive isn't so much the plot, which is perfectly organized and fast-paced, but the satyrical professoral types, aptly combined with rare good people.
A somewhat bitter but also good-natured and original story.
Nonetheless, it's curious, funny, easy to read, with a plot, or a pretext, the Agony Column, not easy to forget.
Nothing to say about the narrative, it gets most from the naivish story, but the book is for the easily impressed.