This has been sat in my TBR pile for years and I've never made time to read it. I think I knew it would be labyrinthine and twisty and so put it off.

But how stupid of me, because I loved it. This book is an homage to film noir and gothic fiction of the eighteenth and nineteenth century - it's a timeless piece of fiction that reads as a part of all of history.

One could niggle. The female characters exist only in relation to the men in their lives - and they exist only within the moral binary of all gothic women - but I guess that's the price of a gothic piece.

It did get a bit twisted even for me and did wonder just how many subplots we were going to get.

But, it all met back together in the way that it should have. Of course, if you have any slight knowledge of gothic fiction or eighteenth century fiction, none of the plot is surprising - it's all quite obvious where it's all going. But that was the comfort for me - to see it done so well even though the core story is a familiar one.

I'll definitely be reading the rest of these, I think there are three more.