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Rating: 
Summary: unreadable
Review: I found this book to be ponderous and, in the end, unreadable. I gave up on it with only 100 pages left to read - I cared that little about what was going to happen to the characters. The book is now in the donation bin of my local public library.
Rating: 
Summary: Not your average forensic thriller
Review: There have been a number of negative reviews of this book. This probably stems from the book being marketed as a "breathlessly paced thriller." Do not be mislead - this is not light summer reading. The author has deliberately selected a specific genre to highlight the theme of the cycle of birth, life, death, decay and rebirth. The various plots and subplots form a dense, layered narrative hinting at the complexity of this cycle. Everything from the description of garden compost overlying a hidden bonepile, the protagonist's multiple exposure photographs, decaying Indian botanical studies, misleading diary excerpts, even descriptions of the growth cycle of various trees are fragmented clues leading to further complexity and layering. Hidden within the fictional layers are insightful references to how 19th century colonial attitudes still resonate and affect the present day. Like Eco's Name of the Rose or Shield's The Fig Eater, or Pear's An Instance of the Fingerpost, the genre is merely the framework for a much more multi-dimensional excursion than the average.
Rating: 
Summary: What's going on here?
Review: This is a somewhat interesting book that I feel lost its way somewhere along the way to the conclusion. The plot was murky, although the writing is generally excellent, and the characters finely drawn. The reader tends to lose the sense of the book, and there's many times when you have no idea where the plot is heading. I had the feeling that the author was as confused at times herself, which is what made the book so unusually odd. There are too many strands of plot lying around, and they really don't tie up neatly, or even close to neatly, at the end, which is not so much a termination as a petering-out of the storyline. You get to the point where you don't really care about the characters and what happens to them, and that's deadly in any work.
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