The Book of Mirrors is a very clever novel. I do like one of those. It is also UTTERLY addictive – picked this up earlier today meaning to make a start on it and now here we are and I’m done. On the surface it is an old school murder mystery but like an onion every layer you peel away reveals another layer, perception is in the eye of the beholder and it is an immersive experience in that your own perceptions and realities will definitely inform what you read.

We start with a manuscript section sent to an agent. But is the story in it true? And what on earth actually did happen all those years ago considering the story is only half told? What follows is a multi viewpoint unravelling of an old crime, character driven in more ways than one, endlessly compelling and with a narrative you will start questioning all the way.

I particularly liked how the author plays with the theme of memory, of how our life experiences skew our viewpoint, that thing that makes eye witness accounts of the same incident so very varied. Whilst there is a police presence in The Book of Mirrors that is absolutely not its focus – I wouldnt like to call it a psychological thriller either, it is more about letting the characters speak and therefore reveal not only themselves but perhaps the truth behind a murder.

Really beautifully constructed to encompass nuance of plot and depth of character, The Book of Mirrors is one of those novels you know you are going to continue to think back on, to wonder about. It is a simple story in many ways, a story oft told within the human experience – what Mr Chirovici does though is highly effective, fascinating and potent storytelling. Hence I just lost my Saturday afternoon to it. Worth every minute.

Highly Recommended.

Remember Iain Pear's 'An Instance Of The Fingerpost'? Well, this is like a simpler, more commercial, more accessible version of that story in a modern setting. A Princeton professor is murdered twenty years ago, and now a series of men - a writer, an agent, an ex-detective - are brought into the act of trying to piece together what happened. Only they all have different perspectives and their own agendas... and only at the end does the true story come into focus.

Overall, this is done well and works because it's kept quite short. All the same, there are some baggy moments in the prose (do we really need to know that someone watches pages coming off their printer before collecting them and clipping them together with a paper-clip? No, we don't),

By the end of it, though, it becomes clear that the book isn't really about what it thinks it is: there's a long ramble about how memory is unreliable and people remember things they can't actually have known, but that's not the premise of the story when it finally comes clear: instead, we have people who simply don't know the truth of their own stories (apart from the murderer who's just lying) even if sometimes they think they do... not the same thing at all.

So, at heart, this is good on the fragmented parts of stories that have to be sifted through in order to get to the truth: but no more so than many other detective stories and the fact that the victim is a psychologist is a bit of a red herring. An enjoyable light read, all the same, perfect for pick-up-put-down commuter reading.

To be posted on Goodreads and Amazon

A manuscript of a 30 year old murder finds its way to a literary agent. He is immediately intrigued by this true crime story. The victim was a famous psychology professor and the murder is still unsolved. Unfortunately the author just sent a part of the manuscript. The end is missing. The literary agent tries to contact the author just to learn that he recently died. The rest of the manuscript is nowhere to be found. So the agent asks a reporter to dig around in this old story. The reporter manages to speak to some of the people who were involved then, but everyone tells the story a little bit different.

I will not give away too much of the plot, it will spoil it for future readers. The story is told a bit aloof. Told from three different people, you never get close to them. The focus is on the story and what happened. The murdered professor was engaged in human memory and the book is also about how people remember things different and maybe change their own memory on purpose. This is quite interesting. The story is full of twists and turns and I was hooked from the first page. And like the author said in the epilogue: this is not a whodunit, but a whydunit”. And “remembrance of the things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were”.

I enjoyed this book very much.