Most helpful customer reviews
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
The Ghost of Isaac Newton Still Haunts the Cobble-Stoned Streets of Cambridge, Aug 17 2007
A spate of killings terrorize Cambridge, and an extremist animal rights group is blamed. However, one woman who seeks the truth has fallen so deeply into this mystery that she can predict, to the day, when each murder will take place and the circumstances in which the victim will be found.
Writer Lydia Brooke returns to Cambridge to attend the funeral of her dear friend and mentor, Elizabeth Vogelsangs. While there, she is asked by Elizabeth's son to complete what would have been Elizabeth's crowning achievement: an in-depth portrait of Isaac Newton the Alchemist. Although reluctant, Lydia agrees and becomes involved in a murder mystery that has spanned over three hundred years. Can Lydia solve the mystery before someone she truly cares about is killed, or will she realize that these events must take place and there is nothing she can do to stop them?
Ghostwalk is a ghost story without the cheap thrills, with an intriguing plot that steadily builds pace throughout the story and characters who are interesting and equipped with enough human frailties that the reader can empathize with them.
As stated previously, this book lacks the cheap thrills or dramatic scares that usually riddle this genre (it will not keep you up at night listening to every creak wondering if it is the ghost of Isaac Newton out to get ya.) Instead, it is a very subtle book - there is no haunted mansion residing on a cliff's edge and no obvious or visible monsters, but surely subtlety is something which should be commended in this genre.
I recommend Ghostwalk to anyone who enjoys good literary fiction with a touch of history thrown in. I do not recommend it to anyone who likes a nice, neat ending with all their questions answered. This novel will leave you wondering about the final outcome, and everyone's interpretation of the story will be different.
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3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Intellectual Murder She Wrote, Jun 30 2007
In her novel "Ghostwalk" Rebecca Stott uses her experience as a professor at Anglia Ruskin University to write an intellectual thriller that toys with the idea that "history lies beneath the present."
The scene is Cambridge where at the behest of her former lover Cameron Brown, a well-known neuroscientist, writer Lydia Brookes ghostwrites a scholarly study left unfinished by Cameron's mother Elizabeth Vogelsang. Vogelsang found drowned clutching a glass prism purported to belong to Isaac Newton, the father of calculus and modern physics, was exploring the hypothesis that the former Lucasian Professor of Mathematics dabbled in the reprehensible field of alchemy. Vogelsang's death, perhaps tied to a radical animal rights group intent on punishing Brown for his animal testing practices suggests more to Lydia as she delves deeper into the unfinished research discovering an odd connection between two sets of murders---one occurring in present day Cambridge, the other historically during Newton's Trinity days. Free-spirited, Lydia finding herself once again deeply involved with her married former lover--she narrates the happenings in the book as if speaking directly to him---embraces both the cerebral nature of the romance techno-fueled by clandestine meetings in Vogelsang's light-scattered writer's retreat and grounded by modern-day text messages and the sinister and supernatural implication that time boundaries blur in a quantum physics context allowing a revered figure from the past to take lives to support the ultimate cover-up.
To her credit, Stott does not board the au courant Da Vinci Code conspiracy bandwagon. Lydia's narration borders on the poetic yet remains intellectual and feasible. Vogelsang's manuscript blends the "what-if" alchemical conjuring of Newton's imagination with the concrete chronological experimentation that led from his mind explorations to the foundations of classical physics and modern mathematics. A colorful re-creation of 17th century Cambridge replete with plague and jealous colleagues juxtaposed with 21st century rivalries and misunderstandings provides a fertile landscape that smears reality from a conventional perspective.
Stott's characters exude complication. Elizabeth whose posthumous scholarship interjects validity to the novel's theme comes across as intense and direct. Lydia, the nonconformist bohemian reeks of romantic good intentions and bittersweet recriminations. Cameron, like Newton before him, smacks of selfish agenda; he is a man unable to stop himself from obtaining his objective through any means. The little-old-lady psychic figure of Dilys Kite injects a paranormal flavor to the mix that sometimes works but most times confuses.
Bottom line? "Ghostwalk" is billed as a thriller, but don't think a page-turner from the Da Vinci Code School of historical cover-ups. Instead be surprised at a well-written first time novel that satisfies on many levels but wisely does not delve too deeply into answers to questions that as yet have no solutions. Recommended to those who enjoy a clever concoction of knowledge founded on centuries old scholarship that could be scattered with one look like white light through a prism.
Diana Faillace Von Behren
"reneofc"
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