A review by mrs_merdle
Sidney Chambers and the Perils of the Night by James Runcie

3.0

I just described to my husband that reading this book was kind of like driving on a dirt road in spring - you're sailing along on a dry road and all of a sudden you're churning in an unexpected patch of deep mud, unable to get much of anywhere. In other words, there were bits I liked very much, with ingenious (if slightly unbelievable - but no worse than Agatha Christie) crimes and intriguing characters, and then there were parts I had a heck of a time even understanding, let alone getting through (and I'm not even talking about the chapter devoted to cricket, which had many sentences like this one: "The innings ended when Zafar Ali, their Indian spinner, was out for a duck, his middle stump ripped clean out of the ground by a snorter from Walsh." That to me is charming, if incomprehensible.). The main thing to me, is that Sidney Chambers himself is inconsistent. Sometimes he is stiff and humorless, and sometimes he is open and easy - and I admit that that is perfectly possible in reality, but hard to reconcile in a fictional character. He often reacts to things like a much older man than the thirty-something he is supposed to be.
The last chapter threw me, as well - most of the book is very much in cozy English mystery land, and then all of a sudden Sidney is being interrogated in a prison in Leipzig, Germany. Huh.
Oh, and the author seems to have a definite interest in describing women's clothing. More detail than I needed (champagne background with white dots? A "large cape collar that stood away from the throat, with unpadded low-set shoulders, and a silhouette tapered to give an oval effect."?).
Well, I've gone on about this long enough I think. You get the idea.