A very long read which took me a little while to get into but the storyline is exquisite and kept me hooked. Thanks for the opportunity to read

A pretty good book! I thought it was well written and I liked the characters involved. It started a little slow but after the first half - it picked up and was worth making it through.

This was an excellently written novel, with twists and turns, keeping the reader guessing until the very end. This was one of those books you can't put down.... Recommended.

Really good book - Some characters I really liked and some I despised. I suppose that is as it should be in a book of this type. Overall a solid read.

Thankyou to NetGalley, Sapere Books and the author, John Matthews, for the opportunity to read a digital copy of Past Imperfect in exchange for an honest, unbiased opinion.
I had a bit of trouble getting into the storyline initially. It just seemed drawn out. But I am so glad I persevered with it as the book was really good.
I loved how descriptive and atmospheric it was and the characters had me intrigued.

This book was an odd reading experience for me. The story begins with the investigation of crimes involving young boys in two different countries, and I found myself confused as the story switched between the two investigations while introducing the personalities of the individual investigators.

Fairly quickly, however, the story settles down into the main plot, which revolves around the case of a young boy in France who was kidnapped and murdered by a pedophile. The pedophile escapes detection, and instead an innocent man is found guilty, imprisoned and eventually dies in a mental hospital.

30 years later, a young boy in England enters therapy to help him cope with the accidental death of his parents. In the course of that therapy, the therapists discover that he has memories that he never experienced, and they discover that these memories are those of the murdered French boy. The therapist responsible for uncovering these memories from a past life reaches out to a detective who was involved in the original case in France.

Faced with this information, the detective reflects back on certain occurrences during the original investigation and realizes that the system was rigged, allowing the pedophile, who is now an important member of the French government, to escape prosecution and subjecting an innocent man to a lifetime of imprisonment.

The rest of the story follows the therapist as she works to elicit clues from the past life memories of this child, without causing irrevocable harm to him in the process, and detective's re-investigation of the crime based on this new information.

This is a new edition of a book that was originally released in 1999, and thankfully it did not feel particularly dated at all. I enjoyed this book, but the pacing felt off to me--my copy of the ebook shows over 600 pages, and most thrillers/mysteries are more like 350 pages. Although the end of the book is exciting and difficult to put down, the middle of the book lagged, with too much of the day-to-day struggles faced by the detective. Although I never felt bored exactly, I definitely noticed how much time it was taking to read it, and that is not an experience I expect with a thriller.

All in all, I think this was an interesting approach to a mystery, and well-written--just a bit too long for me to recommend it without any reservations.

I received an advanced reading copy from the publishers via NetGalley. Thanks!

I read about a third of this and couldn't really get into it. I just felt like it was very drawn out. I'm not going to rate it anywhere else since I didn't finish it.