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A review by tinaha083
The Bone Jar by S.W. Kane
4.0
I wound up really enjoying this book. I have a great fondness for anything that looks like either a cold case, or a modern day case with deep ties to past crimes. The Bone Jar have me exactly what I wanted.
“Two murders. An abandoned asylum. Will a mysterious former patient help untangle to dark truth?” This tag line hooked me right in. Blackwater Asylum is a building filled with secrets. Soon to be renovated, it’s changed hands more than once over the years but something always goes wrong. This time it’s looking positive. And then an elderly woman is found dead in one of the beds of the derelict buildings. Detective Lee Kirby is called in, and the investigation begins.
This had the feeling of a much older novel. It put me in mind of Ellery Queen’s Wrightsville series or Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey, in that it’s a character study masquerading as a mystery, and it handles both elements really well. Kirby as detective plays a good role, and is a detective I could root for, even when I didn’t necessarily agree with how he chose to handle something. He becomes involved with Connie Darke, urban explorer, and the sister of a girl who died in the grounds some years before.
There are wheels within wheel, and so many ties between the past and the present that sometimes you lose track of the fact that sometimes ties can go beyond place. They can go beyond time. There is a great sense of time in this novel, both the slowness of time spent in an asylum, and of time running out to solve the murder.
Blackwater Asylum itself is a character. I read this book a few weeks before it came out and I can still see the design, beauty, and fading of the building. The author makes it live in both time periods and paints a very disturbing picture of what it would have been like to be in a horrible place like that even 50 years ago. The pacing is excellent and I wound up finishing it in one sitting. If you’re a fan of atmospheric writing and strong Gothic vibes, this is probably a great book for you.
Many thanks to Netgalley, Amazon.com UK, and Thomas & Mercer for this free copy in return for a review.
“Two murders. An abandoned asylum. Will a mysterious former patient help untangle to dark truth?” This tag line hooked me right in. Blackwater Asylum is a building filled with secrets. Soon to be renovated, it’s changed hands more than once over the years but something always goes wrong. This time it’s looking positive. And then an elderly woman is found dead in one of the beds of the derelict buildings. Detective Lee Kirby is called in, and the investigation begins.
This had the feeling of a much older novel. It put me in mind of Ellery Queen’s Wrightsville series or Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey, in that it’s a character study masquerading as a mystery, and it handles both elements really well. Kirby as detective plays a good role, and is a detective I could root for, even when I didn’t necessarily agree with how he chose to handle something. He becomes involved with Connie Darke, urban explorer, and the sister of a girl who died in the grounds some years before.
There are wheels within wheel, and so many ties between the past and the present that sometimes you lose track of the fact that sometimes ties can go beyond place. They can go beyond time. There is a great sense of time in this novel, both the slowness of time spent in an asylum, and of time running out to solve the murder.
Blackwater Asylum itself is a character. I read this book a few weeks before it came out and I can still see the design, beauty, and fading of the building. The author makes it live in both time periods and paints a very disturbing picture of what it would have been like to be in a horrible place like that even 50 years ago. The pacing is excellent and I wound up finishing it in one sitting. If you’re a fan of atmospheric writing and strong Gothic vibes, this is probably a great book for you.
Many thanks to Netgalley, Amazon.com UK, and Thomas & Mercer for this free copy in return for a review.