This wasn't a bad read all in all. There was a reasonable amount of action, suspense, and mystery, but the plot suffered due to the ending. The main themes covered here were books, the age of discovery, and the factional turbulence of the 17th century. If you enjoy books about books, and those set in this period, then you should enjoy this. The style of the writing was good, and didn't let the book down, I liked the way the author switched between the two chains of events that were going on in different times, as it helped to keep up the pace of the book. ( )

I commend Ross King's rich vocabulary, dipping effortlessly into the arcane language of bookbinding, alchemy, shipbuilding and navigation; his command of Seventeenth Century history; his familiarity with the buildings and alleyways of London and Prague; his magical ability to conjure long-dead tastes, smells and sounds. But labouring through this book is like walking knee-deep in sucking mud. Every chapter swings from one plot to another metronomically, every character is a passive pawn of inexplicable circumstance, every plot thread is overburdened with pages of historical explanation. The ludicrous plot turns out to be a sham in the end, the heroine disappears from the narrative for most of the middle of the book, and the dread agents of evil in pursuit of the hero are swept away in the end by a deus ex machina just in the nick of time. The weak plot and unmotivated characters fail to support the dense architecture of historical fact built over them, and the entire story simply crumbles into waterlogged earth like Pontifex Hall in the final chapters. ( )

Murder, intruige, dastardly scoundrels and lots and lots of books. ( )

Slightly tedious writing style. It took for ever to get going. Usuallly, after 100 pages of being not very excited, I would have dumped it. But the background story was quite good and gave me an opportunity to read up on my sketchy knowledge of 17th century England and the onset of the Thirty Years War. The story as such could have used a little more tension - a fairly ordinary bookseller gets entangled in the search for a rare book, and lots of sinister characters are trying to find the same book for not apparent reasons.
Ultimately the story was unsatisfactory and the ending outright silly. There they are, hero and heroine, running through a flooded house that is about to cave in, trying to escape the falling rubble, the flood and the bad guys trying to catch up with them. And all the while they are having this twisted, complicated conversation, were she is explaining to him, why he had to do what he did during the course of the book. Totally unbelievable. ( )