Silent In The Grave
by Deanna Raybourn
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Book Reviews of Silent In The Grave
Book Review: a GREAT Victorian era mystery!
Summary: 5 Stars
This book has been on my amazon recommended list for quite some time, I've just never gotten around to picking it up and giving it a read.
I'm glad I finally did! This book was fantastic from the first page to the last. It's extremely well written, almost addictively so. Silent is written from Lady Julia Grey's perspective so that makes it all the more engrossing.
I won't go heavily into the plot because that's been done in many reviews prior to mine but what starts out as what should obviously be the death of Julia's long ailing husband quickly turns into something much more disturbing. Was he actually murdered? Lady Julia's narrative brings the reader along with her as she makes it her mission to find out exactly what REALLY happened to her husband.
The last 75 or so pages of the book is when things really start to come together. The pacing is absolutely excellent and even though it's a good solid 500 + pages, it reads so effortlessly that I blew through it in short order.
The final twist of the book is very well done and satisfying and the ending is a great way to whet the reader's appetite for the next in the series, which I will most assuredly be reading!
This is a great period peice. Fans of any type of well written mystery, especially those leaning towards historical fiction such as Jeanne Kalogridis, Ken Follett, Ariana Franklin and Michael Cox (Silent in the Grave definetly reminds me of The Meaning of Night and The Glass of time which is about as high praise as I can give a book of this genre) will be well served reading Silent in The Grave!
Book Review: Excellent Victorian Mystery
Summary: 4 Stars
I love opening sentences that grab you from the start and make you long to curl up and just read away. Silent in the Grave has such a sentence: "To say that I met Nicholas Brisbane over my husband's dead body is not entirely accurate. Edward, it should be noted, was still twitching upon the floor."
Silent in the Grave is a Victorian mystery set in London. Lady Julia Grey's husband has died of the heart disease that has killed many of the males in his family. About a year after Edward's death Lady Grey finds out that Nicholas Brisbane was hired by her husband to discover who had been sending him very threatening letters and that Mr. Brisbane suspects the death was murder. Together Julia and Brisbane set out to discover the truth behind Edward's demise.
Although this is a mystery, it is also the story of Julia Grey's growth as a person of independent spirit and mind. A proper Victorian Lady she faces some unpleasant truths about her husband and her life that change her into a person with her own personality and not the one she is `supposed' to have. The budding relationship between her and Nicholas Brisbane does not proceed in the usual and rather clichéd way either.
Although I suspected some of the parts of the mystery, many of them were a complete surprise. The story was well plotted and all the characters were nicely fleshed out and believable. The last line of the book is the perfect set-up to the next book Silent in the Sanctuary. I can't wait to read of the further adventures of Lady Julia Grey and the brooding and mysterious Nicholas Brisbane.
Book Review: great characters, mediocre mystery
Summary: 4 Stars
The mystery to me is why I didn't enjoy this more. The author writes very well and the characters are terrific -- Lady Julia Grey (and her family) and Nicholas Brisbane are fascinating, and even minor characters are well drawn and three dimensional. The mystery itself, however, was lame; I'm not very good at prefiguring the culprit, but I spotted this one really early on and never had a red herring or a twist to make me second guess my conclusion, which turned out to be correct. Also, our heroine was often boringly, stultifyingly inactive; whenever Brisbane told her to stay home and be good when he was incapacitated by his mysterious illness -- she DID! What self-respecting heroine stays home and waits for the detective?! That was kind of shocking to me, and made for a boring read. I don't really want to read paragraphs and paragraphs about how the narrator is home, packing boxes or reading or wandering the rooms, waiting for the detective to make something happen. BORING! The plot was inventive in some ways (no spoilers), but tedious in others, and a great many interesting characters were introduced never to be heard from again.
If I could, I'd give it 3+ stars, but I'll round up because I think others may enjoy it more than I did -- I just have such precious little time to read that I want excellence when I do. I want great writing AND great characters AND a great mystery, and I didn't get that here. All in all I found it a frustrating read and won't get another in the series; instead I'll focus on other authors in this genre.
Book Review: A good Victorian mystery set in London
Summary: 4 Stars
The book opens with the death of protagonist Lady Julia Grey's husband, though the majority of the action comes a year later when she realizes that he may have been murdered: she begins to investigate the matter with the help of possible Love Interest and detective Nicholas Brisbane, who has a number of secrets of his own.
Silent in the Grave is very well-written overall, and surprisingly entertaining; up until the last hundred pages I was all prepared to go write a glowing five-star review. But it fails to live up to the expectations set by the beginning of the novel - and, honestly, by the jacket text. A blurb by Karen Harper says it has "one of the most clever endings I've seen" (yes, most clever, not cleverest) while Valerie Anand praises "some lovey twists in the plot and a most satisfactory surprise ending."
That - combined with the quality of the beginning and middle part - led me to expect something truly amazing, which it wasn't at all. The plot seemed sort of average. It was clever, in a way, but also sort of unlikely. The final couple pages in which Julia doesn't expect to see Nicholas again were particularly annoying, because it was so blatantly obvious that she would in fact do so before the end of the book - it felt like I'd read the same ending dozens of times before.
Still, I don't want to let my disappointment over "the novel that could have been" make this sound like an awful book. It really isn't, at all, and I'm looking forward to reading Silent in the Sanctuary.
Book Review: Fascinating historical mystery
Summary: 5 Stars
I bought this book because Amazon had recommended the 2nd book, Silent in the Sanctuary, and it sounded pretty interesting. Since it was the 2nd book, I bought this one as well so I could read them in the right order.
Plus I read the first 2 sentences online and I was hooked. Despite the fact I was reading something else when this arrived, I put that down so I could read this.
This book was well worth the purchase! The glimpse at upper crust life in the 19th century just made the mystery more enticing. Lady Julia, the sheltered 9th child in a rich but odd family, starts the book by saying that she didn't meet Nicholas Brisbane over her husband's dead body. It should be noted that her husband was still twitching on the floor.
What an opening! And the rest of the book did not disappoint. Lady Julia is fully dimensional, Nicholas Brisbane is appropriately mysterious. The supporting characters (family members and servants, Fleur and Dr Bent) are fleshed out and varied enough to be interesting. I'm hoping that Fleur shows up in the second book, which I am going to start reading as soon as I finish this review.
The attention to detail was fascinating, but never intrusive. The pace was slow, but it moved at the pace it needed to in order to give the right amount of atmosphere without smothering you with it.
Highly recommended.