A review by christinem
Asta's Book by Barbara Vine, Ruth Rendell

3.0

I wish I could give this more than 3 stars, because on the whole I really enjoyed it. I was engrossed by the story and by the mystery it offered, and I loved the ending. But there were two points when the author seemed to go so far from the main story that I got bored and started questioning which story they were actually trying to tell. I hoped that by the end the incredibly long detours would make sense, but I still cannot see how the 60 page account of something the protagonist was researching was warranted. This and another, slightly shorter, detour broke the flow of the story and were hard to persist through.