Sat 3 Jul 2010
Reviews by L. J. Roberts
ANDREW GREIG – Romanno Bridge. Quercus, UK, hardcover, March 2008; softcover, October 2008.
Genre: Suspense. Leading characters: Kirsty Fowler and an ensemble cast; 2nd in series. Setting: UK/Europe.
First Sentence: A man on a motorbike finally came to the end of the road.
Journalist Kirsty Fowler is told a story by an elderly gentleman, Billy Mackie, in a retirement home. What she’s told is that copies of Scotland’s Stone of Scone, or Coronation Stone, have been made and copies hidden.
She also learns another, much older stone, the Stone of Destiny, the true coronation seat of Scotland’s oldest kings. These stones have been protected by three men, and now their descendants, known as Moon Runners and identified by a heavy silver crescent-shaped ring containing a peridot.
Someone named Adamson, a very nasty knife-wielding villain, is after the stones, and Billy is murdered shortly after passing his ring on to Kirsty. Now it’s up to Kirsty and her friends to find and protect the stones.
Dear Authors: If you are writing a sequel, please do not assume the reader has read the prior book(s). Unfortunately, that oversight was, in large part, the reason why I did not particularly care for this book.
There were a lot of characters, but it isn’t until almost the end of the book we really understand that many of them had all worked together before. Without that information, their coming together now really didn’t make much sense.
Even had that not been the case, or perhaps because it was, the characters were not well developed; I had very little empathy or even liking of them. The only two characters who did seem significant were Billy, who was literally short lived, and Adamson, a completely sociopathic killer.
You do eventually learn about the characters, but by the time you do, it’s almost too late to care about them. There were huge coincidences. Everyone seems to make just the right connections and find just the person they are looking for with unrealistic ease.
You’re running from a killer and you just happen to pass the bus stand where somewhere from your last adventure just happens to be standing?
There are positive elements to the story. The opening is very visual and compelling. The premise of the story is intriguing, and the suspense is effective and palpable. The author’s voice is quite good, with touches of humor:
“However, they do not keep the feet warm or press against one’s back in the night.”
I laughed aloud at this and realized my cats perform the last two of those functions. Although there are a lot of words and expressions which are unfamiliar to me as an American, the context made their meaning clear so I didn’t feel I’d missed anything.
It wasn’t a non-stop read. It took me a couple days, but I was never tempted to not finish the book. Greig’s style is quite good, but not good enough that I’m likely to read another book by him.
Rating: Okay.
Editorial Comment: The earlier book in this series was The Return of John MacNab (1996), a retelling (in modern dress) of John Buchan’s John MacNab (1925). A review of Return, the newer book, appears here (in Lowland Scots).
July 3rd, 2010 at 10:40 pm
This sounds as if it belongs on the Man on the Run list. I may have to check out the McNAB book even though this review was at best lukewarm — the Buchan is one of my favorites. The Highlands, the Stone of Scone, poaching — just my sort of book.
Though I do sympathize with the complaint about sequels, but I think we are fighting a losing battle. Increasingly the stand alone series novel may be a thing of the past.
July 4th, 2010 at 2:35 am
Among Greig’s books IN ANOTHER LIGHT also has a mystery at its core involving a young man looking into his father’s past out East at the tail end of the Empire before the Second World War.
His novels are all to some extent an attempt to write a new form of the classic adventure story as personified by Buchan, but with modern and less stalwart heroes than Richard Hannay and company. WHEN THEY LAY BARE, THAT SUMMER, and ELECTRIC BRAE are some of the other titles.
For anyone who doesn’t know, Buchan’s JOHN MACNAB is the story of a group of well to do Londoners — wealthy and important men — who decided to take a holiday and go poaching as an antidote to their boredom. Greig’s book borrows Buchan’s plot moving it up to our times and a more diverse and less stalwart lot of heroes. The Buchan book is part of the Edward Leithen series, though the characters Palliser-Yeates, Lord Lamancha, Archie Roylance, and Leithen himself appear in or are mentioned in the Hannay and McCunn novels as well.
MACNAB ironically is probably best known for Buchan’s best female character, Janet Raden (later Roylance), the daughter of a one of the landowners they set out to poach from who gets the best of the four poachers and saves them from scandal. She marries one of them and later is the heroine of Buchan’s THE COURTS OF THE MORNING(1929).
Leithen is considered by most to be the character most like Buchan himself, a solicitor and former Attorney General and also appears in POWER HOUSE, THE DANCING FLOOR, A PRINCE OF THE CAPTIVITY, THE RUNGATES CLUB, and SICK HEART RIVER (MOUNTAIN MEADOW). THE POWER HOUSE (1910) is named by Graham Greene as he first modern spy novel.
July 4th, 2010 at 4:23 pm
While researching Greig and his books, not all of which fall into the crime fiction category, I got the impression, which you seem to go along with, that he’s a literary kind of author, with a special flair for updating (or reworking) old classic novels and ideas.
With indifferent or so-so success, if some of the other reviews I’ve read are any indication. Quite a few agree with LJ about this one, for example.
But perhaps he’s a success on his own terms and with his peers. I’d rather read John Buchan myself, but that’s me.
(JOHN MacNAB is one I haven’t read, and I see no reason why that shouldn’t be the one by Buchan I read next.)
— Steve