Jeffrey Keeten's Reviews > The Quick

”Fire is a far more effective weapon--not only does it destroy the creature’s body, but he will be fascinated by its warmth and may be unable to flee. More than one of them has died simply by refusing to relinquish the pleasant sensation of immersing himself with a blaze, even though his natural resistance to flame is eventually overcome and his body reduced to ash.”

James Norbury is in London writing feverishly trying to master the art of scribbling. He is living with a young, devilishly attractive aristocrat named Christopher Paige. Both will be better people once they begin to have some influence on each other. Norbury needs to be pried away from his writing desk from time to time. Paige needs to spend less time at decadent parties and more time at museums, plays, and operas.

They are just beginning to “discover” each other when they meet with a brutal accident in the street.

Paige is killed and Norbury disappears.

Charlotte Norbury, James’s sister is living on the crumbling family estate where she has been stuck taking care of the final illness of their aunt. She becomes disturbed when she doesn’t hear from James for quite some time and finally decides to go to London to look for him.

She finds him. Loses him. Finds him again.

Charlotte’s education of the human species is taken from a 101 level to a 500 level very quickly. She meets a limbless soothsayer, an acrobatic assassin, a scientifically minded nightmare named Dr. Knife, a charitable, but stone cold killer named Mrs. Price, and runs afoul of an exclusive London men’s society called The Aegolius Club. They are dangerous men with ideas about forming a more perfect society, one in which they are more than just powerful, but seen as supreme beings.

There is always someone wanting to put things out of balance.

I skimmed a few other reviews before deciding to sit down and write this review. It seems that everyone received a memo from the publisher to NOT reveal THE TWIST. I’ve never seen so many GR reviewers so carefully sidestepping the issue of THE TWIST.

I did not receive a drug laced letter, a gun toting menacing visit from a pair of goons or an email detailing how my car would be wired to explode if I revealed THE TWIST. I can only figure that Random House thought I was too insignificant to bother with or someone dropped the ball and forgot to properly threaten me. *Sigh*.

Regardless, because I want to continue breathing and don’t want to be the one that gets all the frigging complaints on my discussion thread I will bow to the conventions already established and not talk about the you-know-what of this novel.

The reason I picked this novel up was because it has been hyped as the best Gothic Novel since the golden age of Gothic Novels. Kate Atkinson referred to it as a Suspenseful, Glorious FEAST. Hilary Mantel thinks it was sly and glittering. Tana French found it Ambitious, Elegant, Atmospheric, and Poignant.

The definition of a conspiracy is that there are more than one person involved, right?

These are all well established, successful writers, but unfortunately they all drank the wrong Kool-Aid. Sorry Hilary, but before you send me a letter of condemnation do know that I loved Wolf Hall.

This is a book that as I was reading it I should have been craving dark red wine and cheese or four fingers of bourbon and a blood red steak, but all that was required was milk and cookies.

On the back flap of the novel under the rather intriguing picture of the author the first thing they mention about the writer is that Lauren Owen was born in 1985. It is significant that the publisher decided that the most important thing they needed to convey to the potential readers of this novel was that she is under 30. Which lends me to believe that they may have felt that this novel is better suited to the youngsters under 30.

They would be right.

The writing is fine in the sense that it was very readable. It is not going to stretch your vocabulary. It has certainly been through the word strainer leaving any words even remotely dusty out of the sentence structures. It reads too much like a drug store spinner rack book or a beach book or a book for a long plane ride where the air is thin and you may not want to agitate the little gray cells too much.

It was a grave disappointment.

There was no atmosphere, no suspense, no glitter, no sexual tension...no gothic feast. The TWIST for goodness sake is revealed very early in the book. All the elements are here for a book that I would have enjoyed, but it turns out that I’m just not the proper audience for this book.