This book is dreadful. The guy simply cannot write. How can anyone pen as many books as Robinson has, but be still totally unable to write?

It is full of unintended non-sequiturs due to faulty sentence structure and stupid phraseology (I can give you LOTS of examples), leading the reader into laughter at their inappropriateness, and including a healthy dose of self-pitying angst exposed by the lead character, for example at around page 405 where he berates himself (over two whole freaking pages) for getting a completely unwarranted assumption utterly wrong. And not for the first time. Either the hero is demented, or Robinson is. Or both.

And it was at around page 405 that I gave up, halfway through the page - I have NEVER gone as far into a book as this and given up because I just could not stand any more. It was pure torture.

I had already previously decided, after several chapters of mind-numbingness, to skip the interminable, exquisitely detailed, temporally misplaced and unremittingly boring flashbacks to the news articles and Grace's memoirs, as being far too badly written and of no consequence to the main storyline, such as it is. I mean - rich elderly guy buys an old house with a history, and starts to unravel (or not) its secrets while boffing his real estate agent almost half his age after losing his own wife less than a year previously. Geez, give us a break, Peter.

Maybe that personal excising of the flashbacks allowed me to continue reading as far as I did, but even then, I just eventually had to cut short my own torment in reading this rubbish. I have no idea how the book finished, nor do I care.

I give it one star simply because I could not give it zero.