Author E.O. Chirovici
Title: The Book of Mirrors
Purchase: Available from 26th January in the UK and the 21st February in the US.
Overall rating: 4/5 stars
Great for: Fans of puzzling psychological mysteries and suspenseful edge-of-your-seat reads
Themes: Crime, suspense, mystery
Review: One of the most suspenseful and unguessable crime mysteries I have ever read! This chronicles the years following the death of Professor Joseph Wieder after a partial manuscript appears, where author, Richard Flynn, claims to have details concerning his mysterious death. Where Richard Flynn has gone and what compelled him to pen his true crime memoir becomes a big of a mystery as what is written between the pages.
Split into three sections and using three different protagonists, this could often become quite a confusing and muddling read, but wading through the murk to get to the truth proved rewarding. Puzzling is definitely the key synonym used to describe this!
I felt constantly a pace behind the narrative and continually had a myriad of conflicting theories concerning who the perpetrator of the crime was and what their intentions were. It wasn’t until the final grand reveal that all became clear and, as the author so rightly put it, this is more of a “whydunnit than a whodunnit”.
Not only is this a clever read but it is also a well-written one. Encompassing nuances of plot, depth of character and intensity of narrative there is little to fault in the beautiful construction of this.
Crime novels are popular and a slew of them are on the market that sell themselves as in the style of Gillian Flynn and Paula Hawkins. It is not since reading these two mystery genre powerhouses that I have felt such a rush of anxiety and felt so powerfully invested in puzzling out the true crime conundrum.
Fast-paced with a cast of untrustworthy characters, this is compelling suspense fiction at its finest!
