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Rating: 
Summary: Missing Friends
Review: I have previously enjoyed Irene Allen's Elizabeth Elliot novels, especially as she has revealed the rich community setting of a Quaker meeting and the inner spiritual life of her protagonist Friend. I was tremendously disappointed in this book. Allen removes Elliot from her natural location, and, as Elliot spends the novel commenting on her dislocation, so the reader feels dislocated as well, with no reward. The circle of Friends whom Elliot relies on is gone, and the characters and suspects she encounters here are not developed enough for us to care. The reader is told much but shared with not at all. I hope if Allen continues to write this series that she returns Elliot to her home in Cambridge and novels that are more fully developed.
Rating:
Summary: Missing Friends
Review: I have previously enjoyed Irene Allen's Elizabeth Elliot novels, especially as she has revealed the rich community setting of a Quaker meeting and the inner spiritual life of her protagonist Friend. I was tremendously disappointed in this book. Allen removes Elliot from her natural location, and, as Elliot spends the novel commenting on her dislocation, so the reader feels dislocated as well, with no reward. The circle of Friends whom Elliot relies on is gone, and the characters and suspects she encounters here are not developed enough for us to care. The reader is told much but shared with not at all. I hope if Allen continues to write this series that she returns Elliot to her home in Cambridge and novels that are more fully developed.
Rating:
Summary: A great disappointment
Review: I really loved all three of the previous books in this series. I am not a Quaker, nor even a Christian, but I was deeply interested in Elizabeth Elliot and her spiritual journey, which complemented in a very suitable way the mystery story in each book. I had some difficulty in believing that the same author had written this book. It was preachy, unfocussed, digressive and completely unsatisfying, all things the previous ones were not. I have much sympathy with the political position the author takes in this book, but it's a d**n poor mystery story, and not even a good political rant, as each gets in the way of the other. Distressing.
Rating:
Summary: Not a mystery, a polemic on evils of govt and nuclear power.
Review: The "old Quaker", as she is constantly and irritatingly referred to in Quaker Indictment, should not have left Massachusetts. The mystery is simplisticly plotted, the characters are one dimensional and the political pronouncements are banal. I read a lot of mysteries, I have always been interested in Quakers and I love the Northwest. This novel, which should have had so much going for it, was a disappointment on all counts. Make another choice.
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