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A review by laurieb755
The Geographer's Library by Jon Fasman
3.0
What felt like a slow start soon became a page turner and I began to appreciate the way Fasman alternated chapters between documenting relics and the narration of Paul. This is definitely a mystery but not along lines of what I usually think of as a mystery.
There are two interwoven stories, that of ancient objects purported to have special qualities, and that of Paul, a newspaper reporter in a small town who finds himself writing an obituary for a man who was a professor at the school from which Paul graduated. The more Paul finds out about the deceased, the more the mystery is unveiled to us as readers of Paul's memoire.
Whether you believe or not in the proposition posed by those who search for the relics - that the relics are used for alchemy, which is to say that they are used to transform objects - you will likely agree that those who search for and find the relics use rather overly zealous methods in covering their tracks once they have procured an object. In addition to the searchers there are those tasked with guarding these relics.
This all relates to the death of the professor for whom Paul is tasked with writing an obituary. Two things stand out for Paul, one is the way in which the professor died and the other is the difficulty he encounters in trying to find out details about the dead man's life. This leads him to dive into research and the possibility of a Boston area newspaper hiring him if his research pans out to an interesting investigative article.
Fasman interweaves the searching, discovering and procuring of the relics with the searching and discovering of the story behind the dead professor. There is a mystery here, to be sure, but to my mind this was definitely not a typical 'who done it' because not much was a surprise. Rather, the story of the relics and the story of those tasked with protecting (and using) them was simply interesting but not mysterious. By the story's end I felt like the conclusion was fitting yet also an easy way out for the author. Given the way anybody with any connection to any of the relics often did not live to tell the tale, I felt that some of the characters got off easy. On the other hand, if they didn't live then there wouldn't be any story documented by Paul…
There are two interwoven stories, that of ancient objects purported to have special qualities, and that of Paul, a newspaper reporter in a small town who finds himself writing an obituary for a man who was a professor at the school from which Paul graduated. The more Paul finds out about the deceased, the more the mystery is unveiled to us as readers of Paul's memoire.
Whether you believe or not in the proposition posed by those who search for the relics - that the relics are used for alchemy, which is to say that they are used to transform objects - you will likely agree that those who search for and find the relics use rather overly zealous methods in covering their tracks once they have procured an object. In addition to the searchers there are those tasked with guarding these relics.
This all relates to the death of the professor for whom Paul is tasked with writing an obituary. Two things stand out for Paul, one is the way in which the professor died and the other is the difficulty he encounters in trying to find out details about the dead man's life. This leads him to dive into research and the possibility of a Boston area newspaper hiring him if his research pans out to an interesting investigative article.
Fasman interweaves the searching, discovering and procuring of the relics with the searching and discovering of the story behind the dead professor. There is a mystery here, to be sure, but to my mind this was definitely not a typical 'who done it' because not much was a surprise. Rather, the story of the relics and the story of those tasked with protecting (and using) them was simply interesting but not mysterious. By the story's end I felt like the conclusion was fitting yet also an easy way out for the author. Given the way anybody with any connection to any of the relics often did not live to tell the tale, I felt that some of the characters got off easy. On the other hand, if they didn't live then there wouldn't be any story documented by Paul…