The Anatomy of Ghosts [Hardcover]

John Holdsworth, former rare book dealer, is a haunted man. Having lost first his child, then his wife, in separate drowning accidents, his business has also gone under. Mrs. Holdsworth, before her apparent suicide, was obsessed with the idea that her son's spirit was communing with her, and when she dies, Holdsworth writes a monograph, The Anatomy of Ghosts, debunking their existence. John is floundering pretty badly when an unexpected offer of employment comes his way. Lady Anne Oldershaw, who has read his monograph, wishes to engage his services for two purposes, to organize her late husband's library, and to save her son Frank, a Cambridge undergrad, from apparent madness - he is convinced he's seen a ghost, and is currently housed in an asylum for the insane.

Dealing with the library is a straightforward task, but dealing with Frank is another matter entirely. What happened the night Frank encountered the "ghost"? Is the apparition that of Sylvia Whichcote, who drowned in the college pond that same night? How and why did she drown? Holdsworth resolves to find answers to those questions, and during his pursuit of the truth, encounters many more little secrets.

Author Taylor sets his mystery at "Jerusalem College", a walled conclave in which only two women reside. It is an atmospheric, somewhat furtive community, with a code of ethics very much its own. Holdsworth, the outsider, is forced to turn over many rocks before he can piece together a theory about what actually happened the night Frank Oldershaw had his breakdown. He also must deal, contemporaneously, with his own ghosts, in a decidedly unsympathetic climate. Taylor presents an uncompromising portrait of late 18th century society, in which a callous aristocracy keeps a heavy foot on the neck of the underclass. His central question, whether haunting a two way street that "flows in both directions" between haunter and haunted, is the spark that makes this story a compelling one. Andrew Taylor is a masterful British author who deserves more attention from American readers.

Some might think "The Anatomy of Ghosts" a bit too predictable for a mystery, but there are a lot more than a plot to appreciate this book.

I loved being immersed into an interesting college life of the 18th century Cambridge. Taylor describes the sounds and smells of the period so well that you feel you are actually there.

And reading the details such as vast difference between the lives of privileged students and scholarship students "sizars" itself was very much enjoyable. This is a perfect book for me to enjoy with a glass of good scotch whiskey after a long busy day.

Taylor is a masterful writer who makes 432 pages feel very short. I wish I knew him earlier. I'll definitely read more works by him.

The Anatomy of Ghosts is an incredibly well written suspense novel by Andrew Taylor. Taylor has crafted a first class mystery and at the same time keeps his reader's eyes riveted to the page from start to finish.

A woman is found dead on the grounds of Jerusalem College in Cambridge. The son of an aristocrat, Frank Oldershaw, goes mad after thinking he's seen this woman's ghost and ends up being committed to in an insane asylum. Our protagonist and unwitting detective, John Holdsworth, is down on his luck and is in desperate need of employment. A book seller by trade, Holdsworth is hired by Oldershaw's mother to take an inventory of Jerusalem College's library and--on the sly--investigate the circumstances of Frank's insanity.

The plot has more twists than San Francisco's Lombard Street. Moreover, the denizens of Taylor's novel are a motley group of characters scraped from the muck of Georgian England's complex caste system. What's more, the characters are all subject to the academic politics of an 18th Century college campus, where alliances and rivalries are of equal importance to scholarly pursuits. As if this were not enough, we are also introduced to a quite frankly creepy secret society on Jerusalem campus, where the mystery of the book both begins and ends.

As complicated as this may all seem, Taylor is such a terrific writer that he is able to pull this off. A master of detail, he takes as much care regarding the authenticity of the scenery as he does with the plot. In fact, he channels old England so authentically that you quite forget that you are reading a modern novel, and get the distinct feeling that this book might have been a gem that was recently uncovered from some hidden, 18th Century archive.

Some readers may find this adherence to period writing to be a liability. They may find the writing a little too elegant and the plot too slow to unfold. But for me, all this simply added to the richness of the novel. It made it more believable, more satisfying, and more suspenseful.

When I reviewed Taylor's Bleeding Heart Square (Bleeding Heart Square), I felt that it was incredibly well written but was just too slow and there was too little mystery. Whatever deficits that book had have been completely remedied here. In The Anatomy of Ghosts, Taylor is able to weave a tangled web, wind up his plot like a steel spring, and let it all explode off the page in the end, with all the mystery unraveled by the end of the novel. And just when you think you know how it all should end--Taylor throws in another twist.

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