The Demoniacs

Rating:
Summary: Yep, It's a Snooze but JDC Has Written Worse
Review: I can see why someone might be bored by this book. It has a very slow beginning. The impoverished Jeffrey Wynne is returning a young lady from France to her uncle, Sir Mortimer. Their way lies across London Bridge, but they discover that a military guard has been set on the bridge. The houses that line both sides of the bridge from time out of mind are to be torn down to allow more room for vehicular traffic. The guard has been set to prevent those who had lived there, by that time the very poor, from creeping back into their homes. After some rather puzzling noodling around Jeffrey and Peg end up back at a house on London Bridge at the sign of the Magic Pen where a locked room mystery of a sort is waiting for them.

Carr's writing is a fair copy of mediocre mid 18th century prose. He has done his homework because he tells the reader more about the minituae of 18th century life than the reader probably wants to know. The reader is also introduced to John Fielding, Magistrate of Bow Street (better known from Bruce Alexander's more recent mystery series) and Laurence Stern (libidinous parson and author of Tristam Shandy among other works).

I ended up wanting to shake both the heroine and the hero. The heroine keeps running headlong into danger in the TSTL (Too Stupid to Live)fashion of heroines in older historicals and the hero isn't particularly nice. The fight scenes are so precisely described that the reader will have to stop and picture what they are doing, which slows the pace even more.

You might want to avoid this book if you are not a fan of JDC or the mid 18th century.

Rating:
Summary: zzzzzzzzzz
Review: This book was bor-ring. It is supposed to be about some evil secret society, but after about fifty pages I gave up, as almost nothing had happened. This book was especially disappointing because I had just read his The Corpse in the Waxworks, written some thirty years before this one, and it was a brisk and inventive detective novel of the locked-room category for which Carr is justifiably famous.

Rating:
Summary: zzzzzzzzzz
Review: This book was bor-ring. It is supposed to be about some evil secret society, but after about fifty pages I gave up, as almost nothing had happened. This book was especially disappointing because I had just read his The Corpse in the Waxworks, written some thirty years before this one, and it was a brisk and inventive detective novel of the locked-room category for which Carr is justifiably famous.