Mystery | Book Chatter

The House on Tradd Street
By Karen White
(NAL Trade, Paperback, 9780451225092, November 2008, 352pp.)

The Short of It:

Full of Southern charm but sadly, the story never grabbed me.

The Rest of It:

Melanie Middleton sells houses. Old houses. But she doesn’t really like them and can’t understand why anyone would ever want to restore one. This becomes a bit of a problem when an old man leaves his home to her with a slew of conditions that must be met. She has to live in the house for year, restore it and only then can she sell it.

Well, you know where this going, right?

It’s haunted and Melanie has, how can I say it…a special talent.

I know that Karen White has a huge following and really, there were parts of this novel that I liked quite a bit. I adored the parts about the house and I grew to like Melanie quite a bit, but in the end it was too much of a good thing. There’s romance. Actually, quite a bit of it and as charming as Jack Trenholm is, the whole relationship was formulaic (think, woman in peril).

Plus, it took way too long to set-up.

Having said this, I took a peek at the other books in the series as this is only book one and I have to tell you that book two looks to be a bit more my style. Everything is more established, the newness of the romance is gone and the story looks pretty good.

Would I give Karen White another shot? Yes, but I prefer a story with a little less romance and a bit more meat on its bones and frankly, more about the house and its inhabitants.

Source: Borrowed
Disclosure: This post contains IndieBound affiliate links.

The Map of Time
By Felix J. Palma
(Atria Books, Hardcover, 9781439167397, June 2011, 624pp.)

The Short of It:

Victorian goodness with some sci-fi and mystery thrown in for good measure.

The Rest of It:

First, a bit about the story itself. Andrew Harrington has fallen in love with a prostitute by the name of Marie Kelly. Andrew comes from money, so falling in love with a working girl was not what his father had in mind. Nevertheless, he falls hard for her. Unfortunately, she is Jack the Ripper’s 5th victim and Andrew arrives too late to save her. Staggering away from the murder scene, he is stricken over what’s happened and plagued by his inability to save her.

Eight years later and influenced by books such as The Time Machine by H.G. Wells, he decides to travel back in time to change Marie’s fate. What follows is a genre-bender like no other.

This book is either brilliant, or a total sham! At 624 pages, it starts off innocently enough, but then by the end of book one, it takes a completely different turn and then heads into the future with a new set of players. Although the story seems to shift underneath you, it’s clear that Palma has something up his sleeve and that the stories are in fact connected in some way.

This book is far from predictable. Every time I turned the page I pondered what just happened. Not because it was confusing in any way, but because I could not imagine how the author kept it all straight while writing the story. There are trips to the past, trips to the future, trips to parallel universes, there’s a murder (actually more than one), thuggery (I came up with that term), fraud, a budding romance…okay, more than one and appearances by all sorts of folks including: The Elephant Man, Henry James, Bram Stoker and H.G. Wells himself.

When I say that this book was a wild ride through time… I am not kidding. It was an adventure and from those very first pages, I found myself hooked. Mainly because I HAD to know how it ended, plus I love Victorian London and sci-fi. However, by the end of the book I was left with my mouth gaping open. I read this with another blogger and we were both either incredibly impressed or royally ticked. We weren’t sure. I’m still not sure.

If you like the elements I mentioned, enjoy a genre-bender every now and then, and don’t mind being pulled through a lot of different subplots to partake in the adventure, then you’ll love this book. After spending some time thinking about it, I am leaning more toward it being brilliant, but it’s was a slow realization for me.

Note from Ti: The hardcover edition is GORGEOUS! The cover is partially matte, partially glossy which you can’t tell from the image. It also includes end papers depicting the Map of Time itself. It’s all very well done.

Source: Sent to me by the publisher.