Selpulcre

Sepulcre by Kate Mosse was suggested to me because I enjoyed The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane, The Devlin Diary, and The Forgotten Garden. All three of those books had a historical fiction mystery that was also part of a present day story. As I've mentioned before, I really enjoy historical fiction and mysteries so I really liked the mix of the past and the present colliding with a mystery in the middle.

Sepulcre also had this format. However, I was pretty disappointed in it. I couldn't get interested in the story line from the 1890s until I was rather far into the book. The characters in this section did some rather stupid things. It was one of those instances where you wanted to yell at these fictional people. I enjoyed the present day characters and their stories. However compared to the historical sections of the book, the present day plot was much shorter. I also found sections of the book irrelevant to the story. My copy was approximately 550 pages. The book could have been edited down quite a bit without losing important aspects of the story. Finally, the whole tarot thing made some but not a lot of sense to me.

There were things I did enjoy, such as Meredith's relationship with her adoptive mom and Meredith's research about her family. In fact, I think I would have really enjoyed a culled down story more geared towards Meredith and the present with small bits of the historical part thrown in.

Oh well. They aren't all winners.