Reviews

Apothecary Melchior and the Ghost of Rataskaevu Street by Indrek Hargla

lisetekiisk's review

adventurous challenging dark emotional mysterious sad medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Plot
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.0

johannabeek's review

dark mysterious medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Plot
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? No

2.75

lkuunal's review

adventurous dark mysterious tense medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0

windless_poet's review against another edition

dark mysterious tense medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? No

5.0

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Content Warnings

Moderate: Violence, Torture, Physical abuse, and Kidnapping

vsbedford's review against another edition

3.0

A nice medieval mystery that doesn't have a hyper-modern detective importing all sorts of anachronistic methods and beliefs into solving a string of murders in a mid-size town - people are drinking rat poop to help them sleep and they like it. The writing is solid, although I found the pace dragged a bit here and there, and the mystery completely unsolvable but Apothecary Melchior is likable and surrounded by solid secondary characters so definitely worth a read.

I received an ecopy from the publishers and NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

mariliis's review against another edition

mysterious medium-paced

4.0

tiinasusanna's review against another edition

4.0

Luettuani ensimmäisen olikin luettava heti perään toinen.

Kaikki mitä havaitsin ensimmäisessä kirjassa pätee tähänkin

malinowy's review against another edition

5.0

Clearly these Apothecary Melchior novels are becoming my go-to feel-good read, because I enjoyed this a lot. I read this in 10 chapter installments with my friend and had a lot of fun discussing the plot and coming up with theories on what has happened and why. (Suffice to say, I was pretty off. Like, I had picked one thing that turned out to be significant, but missed quite a lot of others.)

Two men die and soon after a 3rd body turns up as well in the city of Tallinn and it seems like all of them saw a ghost before their death. Melchior with his friends starts to look into things. There are a lot of rumours and folktales (which might have had more truth in them than anyone thought) which were actually pretty interesting. I found the plot overall good, though at times it did feel there was some repetition and focus on irrelevant things a bit too much.

These books seem to have a similar structure every time, so I wasn't too frustrated when the story only got going after 100 or so pages. After all, a lot of foundation was laid before that, you just kind of missed it if you didn't pay attention. And that's what I like about these books, you need to pay attention to what you read if you want to figure out what happened and why. I think reading and discussing this with another person definitely helped that, because this is also one of those books you can easily read in a weekend and then feel stupid at the end when you realize you missed some obvious hints.

Would love to read the entire series so far, but also holding back because what would I then read? Maybe one every few months until the latest novel comes out in Finnish as well.

wexlyz's review

4.0

Täitsa normaalne kriminull. Meeldis rohkem kui eelmine osa. See keskaegne miljöö mind ikka tõmbab, nii et proovin järgmisi osi ka.