Andrew Hughes (3)

In certain ways this is a book that should be perfect for me but I suppose some of the anticipation somewhat soured it for me.
Abigail Lawless is eighteen and beginning to look at her future more seriously, she's heading into adulthood and her friends are too. Abigail is the daughter of the Dublin Coroner and her mother died when she was younger leaving her to be brought up with her fathers interests. Not that she isn't a person with interest in science, she writes letters to the Royal Society, one theorising why there was a year without a summer, and is frustrated somewhat by the limits set on her by society.
Her father isn't perfect but he does try and she wants more so she does what she can to grasp more. She does not approve of the limits and tries hard to circumvent them. But she also lives within that world and within the limits.
With a friend being drawn into a religious sect and one of the maids of that household found dead after she kills her infant, Abigail senses that not everything is as it seems. She feels compelled to investigate using the tools she has, sometimes haring off without thinking about possible consequences. Still there is an opening for a sequel and a possible romance on the cards.
I did enjoy it but the end felt incomplete somehow. It feels like a book I might enjoy more on a re-read.… (mere)

Perhaps the hardest trick to pull off as a novelist is a first-person narrative with an unsympathetic narrator. Andrew Hughes, regrettably, doesn't manage it here. The eponymous Delahunt has no redeeming feature beyond candour, and for all the chilly precision of the prose, it's just too hard to care about what happens to him. His execution comes as a welcome relief to the reader if not the narrator.

To see how an unsympathetic protagonist should be done, Patricia Highsmith's Ripley novels are an excellent starting point.… (mere)