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3.55 AVERAGE
3.55 AVERAGE
dark
emotional
funny
mysterious
tense
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
Thoroughly disappointed with this book after reading the first two in the series. The inclusion of Jack the Ripper and his thoughts and actions was just gruesome for gruesome's sake. There was little mystery and plot, and the detectives I came to love we're just seemingly idiots. Honestly, I couldn't even finish it. Maybe it got better? I didn't want to stick around to find if it got worse.
3/4ths of the way into this book, I thought I was going to have to break up with the Murder Squad. Most of the book is from the killer's perspective which I didn't care for, even if it was Jack the Ripper. There's a lot of inner dialogue trying to dissect why Jack did what he did. That's not the reason why I started this series. Nor, did I want to learn any more about Cinderhouse, who we heard enough of in the first book. There are hardly any scenes about Day or Hammersmith in the book. They seem like bystanders to the action for most of the book. At the big finish, it was tense and exciting. Boy, did it take a long time to set up the scene. The ending saved it for me. Well, there's a clit cliffhanger of sorts. So, I have to see what happens next.
Just a little too much graphic detail in this one for me. Writing and characters are great though.
dark
mysterious
tense
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
This isn't your standard Victorian era cozy. It's not Col. Mustard in the ballroom with a lead pipe. This is Archie Sheridan and Gretchen Lowell one hundred years in the past. Dark, gritty, and compelling, The Devils Workshop is probably Grecian s best novel. The story started out rather implausible but I soon forgot, or stopped caring, about the things that put me off early in the book. A worthy effort.
These books are always such fun. Good solid setting in Victorian England and more than just an appearance of Saucy Jack.
Its as if another person wrote this book and put Grecian's name on it and I made it about a third through before I had to give it up; it felt so much like watching a favorite series go downhill.
First off, the biggest change is its no longer the rich multiple POVs the first two books had where even minor characters got a voice and personality. Now it's pretty much all Jack the Ripper with some on Claire and Walter and a few criminals. It pretty much turned from a series about Walter and Nevil to basically one about Jack which was jarring and annoying because I came back to see them grow, not Jack. Plus the whole characterization of Jack is overdone, over the top and weird, with him walking about nude in the middle of London and thoughts of being the Messiah.
Second, it was as though he scrapped the characterizations and setting/mood of the first two books. For example, Walter's mentor Adrian March makes an appearance in this book and it is so wrong how he is written! When he is mentioned in the first book, this is a man that was the best Inspector and saw a lot of promise in Walter and encouraged him to come to London. But the instant he arrives on scene, he's constantly questioning Walter like he's an idiot and when they make conjectures and find clues, he dismisses them in a very arrogant manner. Its so off-character that I wouldn't be surprised if he was a bad guy, but then Walter is made into a worry-wart and a push-over that its no wonder he doesn't even notice that his own mentor is being so damn weird! Even worse, Claire, who is fiery, caring, smart and brave, is now just a snappy, irritating lady, whose mood is blamed on her pregnancy, and it made me upset that she was reduced to such.
The setting/mood also just instantly takes on a grisly, gory feel that one would get if they watched Saw instead of the eerie terror of The Black Country or the bustle and optimism with a stain of murder that The Yard had.
Honestly it just felt like the series had abruptly ended with Book 2 and an obliging fan just wrote this and threw in Jack the Ripper because they've always been itching to write a Jack the Ripper fanfiction with Grecian's characters.
First off, the biggest change is its no longer the rich multiple POVs the first two books had where even minor characters got a voice and personality. Now it's pretty much all Jack the Ripper with some on Claire and Walter and a few criminals. It pretty much turned from a series about Walter and Nevil to basically one about Jack which was jarring and annoying because I came back to see them grow, not Jack. Plus the whole characterization of Jack is overdone, over the top and weird, with him walking about nude in the middle of London and thoughts of being the Messiah.
Second, it was as though he scrapped the characterizations and setting/mood of the first two books. For example, Walter's mentor Adrian March makes an appearance in this book and it is so wrong how he is written! When he is mentioned in the first book, this is a man that was the best Inspector and saw a lot of promise in Walter and encouraged him to come to London. But the instant he arrives on scene, he's constantly questioning Walter like he's an idiot and when they make conjectures and find clues, he dismisses them in a very arrogant manner. Its so off-character that I wouldn't be surprised if he was a bad guy, but then Walter is made into a worry-wart and a push-over that its no wonder he doesn't even notice that his own mentor is being so damn weird! Even worse, Claire, who is fiery, caring, smart and brave, is now just a snappy, irritating lady, whose mood is blamed on her pregnancy, and it made me upset that she was reduced to such.
The setting/mood also just instantly takes on a grisly, gory feel that one would get if they watched Saw instead of the eerie terror of The Black Country or the bustle and optimism with a stain of murder that The Yard had.
Honestly it just felt like the series had abruptly ended with Book 2 and an obliging fan just wrote this and threw in Jack the Ripper because they've always been itching to write a Jack the Ripper fanfiction with Grecian's characters.
I liked the first two books in this series, despite some holes in the plots, but I didn't like this one. I thought all the passages written from the point of view of the Saucy Jack were just boring, and skimmed over a lot of them. The bad guys and action were so over the top as to be cartoonish. And, didn't we just run around a bunch of underground tunnels in The Black Country? I already have the next book out from the library, and will probably give it a try, but it will have to be a lot better than this one to keep me interested in the series.
Oh boy. I thought the first Murder Squad book was excellent. The second book felt like a stumble, but still had a lot going for it for the first 80% or so of the book. Now, though, I am honestly thinking real hard if I even want to read the fourth one.
So the book's synopsis already gives away the big thing: Jack the Ripper is back. That by itself is already a big head scratcher, because it almost feels like a desperate ratings grab by a failing TV show. In my opinion it would have been much better to see the Murder Squad tackle original murders, and to give the book series room and time to grow and give the focus for what felt like a great cast of characters. But I guess Alex Grecian disagrees, and felt like we needed a cast of recurring criminals and bigger overarching plotlines.
But it gets far sillier than that. With "The Devil's Workshop" we find ourselves in a hole where a mysterious secret organization has been rounding up prisoners, hauling them off to a secret underground prison complex, and torturing them for vague reasons. They felt like prison wasn't punishing them enough, and instead wanted to make their victims literally feel the effects of their crimes. As this secret society consists of government officials, police officers, prison wardens etc, the group could just have quietly taken the prisoners they wanted out of prisons for their torture programme, but instead they choose to execute a fake prison break so convoluted it would make Fast and the Furious movie fans throw their arms up in disgust. Let's just say it involves derailing a train into a prison with the intended end result of delivering a group of violent prisoners into their clutches, but instead said prisoners are let loose on the streets of London, Jack the Ripper included.
I have nothing against pulp. Quite the contrary! But because "The Devil's Workshop" doesn't commit all the way, and instead tries to be a serious police procedural, the end results feel dissonant and far from pulp. This is the author deciding he needed to get to point Z ("Jack the Ripper and other violent lunatics free, plus there's a secret society our heroes also need to fight against"), but didn't really want to think too hard about logical steps between point A and there, and just threw together something ludicrous, which feels so out of place in the Murder Squad series. Up until now the series aimed at realism and Grecian clearly tried to -- and mostly succeeded -- make the criminals' actions seem rational (to them) and consistent. We have indeed come a long way from a disturbed tailor pushed to ever more drastic actions to cover up his crimes.
But we don't stop there. In the tradition of the Murder Squad books, we also get frequent chapters from the point of view of the criminal, in this case Jack the Ripper. And so we take a hard right turn to a real awkward place where Jack reads like a hyper intelligent and sophisticated Mary Sue from some edgy teenager's imagination of what a totally twisted psychopath is like. Like a 19th century Hannibal Lecter, which is very much at odds with how the real Jack the Ripper seems to have been, based on for example the "From Hell" letter. It feels awkward and off-putting, doubly so as the book also seems to give Jack the Ripper something of a redemption arc, and tries to turn him into an anti-hero, a serial killer with a heart of gold. This kind of thing can be done, as Timur Vermes' excellent "Look Who's Back" showed, but it would have required a far defter touch than "The Devil's Workshop" manages. Instead, the results here just feel crass and juvenile.
For a moment there, I really loved the Murder Squad books. The first book in the series was so good. The idea of a series of books exploring the lives of homicide investigators in a city that had lost all faith in them in the aftermath of the Jack the Ripper spree was an excellent idea. We definitely did not need Jack the Ripper as a character, because he was better used as the huge shadow looming over the city; a symbol of a new age, and a new type of criminal the existing police force was in no way equipped to deal with. This shocking new age also opened the door for a new breed of police officer, whose strange new ideas would have been laughed out by the old boys' club just a few months earlier. Exploring this new world of change and science felt like an excellent hook and I was 100% on board from the first pages of the first book.
"The Devil's Workshop" feels like a complete abandonment of that idea in favour of ... I don't even know what. But I do know that after this book, I am not terribly interested in finding out.
So the book's synopsis already gives away the big thing: Jack the Ripper is back. That by itself is already a big head scratcher, because it almost feels like a desperate ratings grab by a failing TV show. In my opinion it would have been much better to see the Murder Squad tackle original murders, and to give the book series room and time to grow and give the focus for what felt like a great cast of characters. But I guess Alex Grecian disagrees, and felt like we needed a cast of recurring criminals and bigger overarching plotlines.
But it gets far sillier than that. With "The Devil's Workshop" we find ourselves in a hole where a mysterious secret organization has been rounding up prisoners, hauling them off to a secret underground prison complex, and torturing them for vague reasons. They felt like prison wasn't punishing them enough, and instead wanted to make their victims literally feel the effects of their crimes. As this secret society consists of government officials, police officers, prison wardens etc, the group could just have quietly taken the prisoners they wanted out of prisons for their torture programme, but instead they choose to execute a fake prison break so convoluted it would make Fast and the Furious movie fans throw their arms up in disgust. Let's just say it involves derailing a train into a prison with the intended end result of delivering a group of violent prisoners into their clutches, but instead said prisoners are let loose on the streets of London, Jack the Ripper included.
I have nothing against pulp. Quite the contrary! But because "The Devil's Workshop" doesn't commit all the way, and instead tries to be a serious police procedural, the end results feel dissonant and far from pulp. This is the author deciding he needed to get to point Z ("Jack the Ripper and other violent lunatics free, plus there's a secret society our heroes also need to fight against"), but didn't really want to think too hard about logical steps between point A and there, and just threw together something ludicrous, which feels so out of place in the Murder Squad series. Up until now the series aimed at realism and Grecian clearly tried to -- and mostly succeeded -- make the criminals' actions seem rational (to them) and consistent. We have indeed come a long way from a disturbed tailor pushed to ever more drastic actions to cover up his crimes.
But we don't stop there. In the tradition of the Murder Squad books, we also get frequent chapters from the point of view of the criminal, in this case Jack the Ripper. And so we take a hard right turn to a real awkward place where Jack reads like a hyper intelligent and sophisticated Mary Sue from some edgy teenager's imagination of what a totally twisted psychopath is like. Like a 19th century Hannibal Lecter, which is very much at odds with how the real Jack the Ripper seems to have been, based on for example the "From Hell" letter. It feels awkward and off-putting, doubly so as the book also seems to give Jack the Ripper something of a redemption arc, and tries to turn him into an anti-hero, a serial killer with a heart of gold. This kind of thing can be done, as Timur Vermes' excellent "Look Who's Back" showed, but it would have required a far defter touch than "The Devil's Workshop" manages. Instead, the results here just feel crass and juvenile.
For a moment there, I really loved the Murder Squad books. The first book in the series was so good. The idea of a series of books exploring the lives of homicide investigators in a city that had lost all faith in them in the aftermath of the Jack the Ripper spree was an excellent idea. We definitely did not need Jack the Ripper as a character, because he was better used as the huge shadow looming over the city; a symbol of a new age, and a new type of criminal the existing police force was in no way equipped to deal with. This shocking new age also opened the door for a new breed of police officer, whose strange new ideas would have been laughed out by the old boys' club just a few months earlier. Exploring this new world of change and science felt like an excellent hook and I was 100% on board from the first pages of the first book.
"The Devil's Workshop" feels like a complete abandonment of that idea in favour of ... I don't even know what. But I do know that after this book, I am not terribly interested in finding out.