Julia Wallis Martin

Very well done. I especially liked that the impressions of the characters come from their own viewpoints and aren’t necessarily the way they truly are or the way others perceive them to be. We are all short sighted when it comes to our own personalities.

The author set up the obvious suspect and I dismissed him. The author set up an alternative suspect which I believed at first until I found out through another person’s perspective, what that person was really like. That left just show more one…and what else could the author do? show less

Martin sets her very compelling mystery in a dark and gloomy landscape. The writing beautifully captures the landscape dotted with abandoned barns and struggling farms: “The sky hung drab as a dishcloth , heavy and grey, bits of cloud clinging to it like scum from warm greasy water. It seemd to him a typical Thames Valley sky, as if Ernst Wachmann had somehow managed to transfer it along with the cattle, the tools, the vehicles. But one thing had changed: if his memory served him show more correctly, the first time he had come here he had experienced the feeling of being surrounded by wildlife, invisible to the eye but there – comfortingly there. Now, there was no such feeling, just the cold ploughed earth, the ironstone house and the prefabricated buildings located behind and to the side of it.” The gloomy setting perfectly matches the doomed story of three friends who – twenty years previously – were involved in the death of Helena, their seemingly perfect friend. Frumpy Joan, crazy Richard and soul-dead Ian each have their reasons for not wanting the past coming to light. A trio of policeman round out the principals: Driver, the retired police officer who was unable to catch a killer twenty years ago, Rigby, the young policeman assigned to the case of the recovered body, and Dalton, the senior policeman assigned to the case.

After a little research on the author – who at least from her pictures can not be said to suffer from Joan’s frumpiness – it would appear that Joan’s desperate desire to escape from her life of council estates (housing projects to us Americans) is based on Martin’s own history of living in such an estate during her childhood. Joan, the character in the book, is a former journalist and frustrated novelist. She has never managed to leave the awful neighborhood she grew up in despite aspirations to move to London and lead a life of glamour or at least middle class normalcy. After losing her job as a reporter for the Manchester Evening News, Joan works as a freelance writer in a squalid flat. “She consoled herself with the thought that writers were often notoriously unhappy in their private lives, particularly those who were reduced to writing features for downmarket magazines, and, whenever she felt bogged down by the frustration of writing features that rarely sold, she worked on the Book, that mysterious, ethereal, pageless thing that flickered on the screen of her computer like a ghost.”

A Likeness in Stone probably deserves 4 stars, however, I found the mood and resolution so relentlessly depressing that I couldn’t go more than 3½. The 3½ is probably unfair because the writing is truly wonderful. show less

The storyline was good but it was a little difficult to keep up with the role of some of the characters. When the book started out it led the reader to believe that it was a paranormal activity story but as it progressed it was more a story of secrets and deceit. At any rate it was well done.

I found this book on a librarians site in a category called reservoir noir. Surprisingly, or perhaps not, there are a fair number of books that focus on villages that were flooded in the ponds behind newly built dams. A couple of prominent ones in the category: Reginald Hill's On Beulah Height and Peter Robinson's In a Dry Season. Likeness in Stone is just as good. Martin is a new writer to me, but I'll definitely give her another shot on the basis of this one. The book is generally very show more well managed (stagecraft shows a bit too much here and there, but nothing too egregious) with lots of insightful interiority worked well into the plot. show less