Customer Review: Long, but worth it

Yes, this book is a long one, but it is well worth the effort! This is the first in the Merrily Watkins series, and if the rest that follow are as gripping as this one, I for one, can hardly wait to read them. Merrily Watkins is a single-mother of a precocious fifteen-year-old girl named Jane. She also is an Anglican minister. Her first posting is in a small insular English village called Ledwardine. Not much has really changed in Ledwardine as Merrily and Jane find out. The setting is present-day, but the story kept taking us back to the 17th century where a former minister of the old church was found hanging in the orchard. There are long-buried secrets here that are fighting to come out, but the people holding the secrets will stop at nothing to keep things hidden. The book is very well-written. A nice blend of the occult, history, modern suspense and the play of very-well drawn characters.

Customer Review: Intriguing premise in an overly long treatment

The real story does not start until well past page 250. Prior to that it is ALL exposition, a parade of a veritable phonebook of characters, and numerous unnecessary tangential subplots. It took me a long time to figure out what the real focus was in this rambling, incident-filled book. It's obvious that Rickman thoroughly enjoyed creating this village and all its inhabitants but many of these characters serve no purpose whatsoever. Lots of false tension when contrived plot incidents are thrown in as obstacles before we get to the real meat of the story. And endless reiteration and redundancy - especially the moody, angst-filled musings of the ex-rock star who contemplates a la Hamlet his own suicide in four separate sections. And the first time wasn't even that interesting. This book could easily have been less than one half of its voluminous, turgid length.

Initially I was drawn to this because it was a modern crime tale that blended folklore and the supernatural. I like what Rickman is trying to do here, but there's quite a bit of digging through a bleak and murky mine before you get to even a smidgen of the vein of gold that is the real story of Merrily, Jane, Lucy and Lol. The ideas of fate vs. purpose, faith vs. doubt, the contrast of the paradoxes in organized religion and less structured pagan or naturist beliefs -- all of these themes finally come through in the last third of the book. The "crime" part of this crime novel (and there are a few) is almost thrown in as an afterthought. Really this is something akin to George Eliot meets Arthur Machen (how's that for an egghead literary allusion?) in a contemporary setting. I'll try my hand at the next book in the series in which Merrily becomes an exorcist and see if Rickman manages to lay off the tangents, minutiae and often mundane sideline incidents. I see that all of these books weigh in at over 400 pages. Somehow I don't think I'm going to make it through all of these.

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