It was an interesting experience reading this book! My opinion of it changed as I read, and oddly, it had nothing to do with the fact that the characters are all insufferable. They're university drama students obsessed with Shakespeare; frankly I assume that "insufferable" is their basic state.

Of the seven main characters, one dies. It's murder. (This is a murder mystery book, so no surprises there.) And for the best part of a year, rehearsals and performances go on, as the six remaining students try and fail to cope, a state of affairs that's complicated by the fact that one of them is responsible for the death of their colleague, and all of them bear some culpability in covering it up. I understand that the author is a Shakespeare scholar themselves, and this explains why so much of the book is bound up with the plays - particularly Macbeth and King Lear - and why so much of the dialogue is these students talking with each other through Shakespeare quotes. It's very cleverly constructed, and for ninety percent of the book I was expecting to give it four stars. Then it all fell apart at the end for me, which is why it's gone down to three.

There's a small part of me that thinks that this ending is only possibly because these isolated obsessives have so immersed themselves in melodrama that their frankly ridiculous choices seem, to them, to be actually reasonable. And honestly, if I argue - as I do, frequently - that science students need a solid grounding in the humanities to keep them from reducing people to exploitable objects or collateral damage, then I have to say that this book is an argument for the reverse: arts students needing their studies leavened with science so they don't turn out to be completely irrational navel-gazers with no common sense. There's a larger part of me, though, that feels that so much attention was given, in this book, to the construction and integration of the dialogue that character work fell a little by the wayside. That, perhaps, is why I find the end so very unconvincing.