欧宝娱乐

This is another of those books that I find very difficult to describe. I didn't hate it, but I'm not so sure that I liked it, either.

I found the protagonist to be very unlikeable. In fact, there was only one character in the book that I truly and unreservedly liked, and he only came in sort of near the end. Yes, there were reason that the protagonist had the personality she did, and those reasons came out very near the end.

I just don't even know what to say about it. It's sort of about a writer who's traveled back to visit her cousin in England, planning to stay with him in his flat on the top level of the family house. When she arrives, he's mysteriously vanished, and all her attempts to find out from his office, his friends, and his girlfriend are met with stone walls. There are two workmen there who seem to believe the place is haunted. She is very abrasive, brusque--definitely not someone I'd want to hang out with.

The book she's supposed to be writing isn't going all that well, either. And what's the deal with that, anyway? The protagonist in her book has traveled to London, and there's some bosh about her and the ghost of Jack the Ripper, and then they're in Romania----it's a little hard to follow.

Her ancestor was allegedly Charles Dickens' model for Ebenezer Scrooge. I never did figure out how that was supposed to work into the whole framework of the story, despite a letter that the cousin reads to her at the end of the book.

What Maguire was trying to do here I cannot fathom. It's not his best book.