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Jedediah Berry

Author of The Manual of Detection

6+ Works 1,220 Members 80 Reviews 2 Favorited

About the Author

Includes the name: Jedediah Berry

Image credit: Photo by Lucy Hamblin.

Works by Jedediah Berry

The Manual of Detection (2009) 1,183 copies
A Window or a Small Box (2013) 21 copies
Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet No. 24 (2009) — Editor — 7 copies

Associated Works

The Coyote Road: Trickster Tales (2007) — Contributor — 499 copies
Salon Fantastique: Fifteen Original Tales of Fantasy (2006) — Contributor — 130 copies
Some of the Best from Tor.com: 2013 Edition (2013) — Contributor — 113 copies
Cape Cod Noir (2011) — Contributor — 46 copies
The Best Bizarro Fiction of the Decade (2012) — Contributor — 39 copies
The Stories: Five Years of Original Fiction on tor.com (2013) — Contributor — 38 copies
Best American Fantasy 2 (2009) — Contributor — 20 copies
Conjunctions: 52, Betwixt the Between (2009) — Contributor — 19 copies
Fairy Tale Review: The Green Issue #2 (2007) — Contributor — 18 copies
A Manner of Being: Writers on Their Mentors (2015) — Contributor — 12 copies
Gigantic Worlds (2015) — Contributor — 11 copies
Flashed: Sudden Stories in Comics and Prose (2016) — Contributor — 7 copies

Tagged

2009 (5) 2010 (7) 2011 (7) American (12) ARC (6) audio (6) audiobook (7) calibre (8) carnival (13) circus (8) crime (18) crime fiction (7) detective (54) detective fiction (6) dreams (31) ebook (11) fantasy (74) fiction (158) first edition (5) goodreads (6) library (8) literary (5) magical realism (17) mysteries (5) mystery (160) noir (30) novel (21) read (19) read in 2009 (6) Roman (5) science fiction (14) signed (6) sleep (6) steampunk (31) surreal (22) surrealism (6) thriller (5) to-read (95) unread (9) wishlist (6)

Common Knowledge

Members

Reviews

A clever blend of mystery and fantasy-sort of "something wicked this way comes" meets Dashielle Hammett.
I wish I'd read it before aseeing Inception
 
Flagged
cspiwak | 76 other reviews | Mar 6, 2024 |
A decent freshman effort. It has an interesting premise, and a fun alternate reality in the vein of the Eyre Affair.

That being said though, the writing was at times a bit labored, the characters were rather flat, and their motives were often indecipherable.

It's a book about reality, dreams of reality, dreams of dreams of reality, and so on. The rules in each world seemed inconsistent and contrived, at least on first reading. Unfortunately I'll probably never get around to a second one.

And most damning for me anyway, at least in a mystery novel, was that so many of Unwin's deductions just seemed far fetched and unsubstantiated.

Plus: a Mexican standoff? Really?

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Flagged
emmby | 76 other reviews | Oct 4, 2023 |
I really trudged through this book. I don't even remember putting it on hold at the library, but I must have! (Unless I tragically picked up someone else's hold...it could happen). Anyway, I'm sure the hook for me was mysteries being solved in dream states or something like that. I can say I read it. I am ready to move on!
 
Flagged
BarbF410 | 76 other reviews | May 22, 2022 |
Fascinating and surreal, this book put me in mind of the movie Dark City which is a mixture of noir and dream time in which things are not what they seem at first glance.

Charles Unwin, a clerk of the detective agency where he works, inexplicably gets promoted to detective when his detective, Severt(sp?) disappears off the grid. Unwin finds himself thrust into a surreal landscape of several crimes which he'd thought solved but due to some of his own conceits (such as his leaving out the more interesting details of Severt's musings over his cases) were actually not solved at all. It's up to Unwin to untangle the dreams of others, his own case files and the strange clues he's given by a variety of interesting people along the way to solve this riddle and get his old job back.

I like the feel of the story. The constant rain, the sense of shades of gray, Unwin's prized bicycle and umbrella, his habits and curiosity are so well described, you feel as if you're within the book itself. The structure of the book is more like a dream itself, with everything out of synch and not following any particular timeline. While this may seem confusing at first, the further into the story, the more sense it makes. It's well worth the time to puzzle your way through with Charles Unwin.
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Flagged
fuzzipueo | 76 other reviews | Apr 24, 2022 |

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Statistics

Works
6
Also by
13
Members
1,220
Popularity
#21,044
Rating
½ 3.7
Reviews
80
ISBNs
24
Languages
5
Favorited
2

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