Thrilling ... Expertly paced ... Predictably, the novel’s twin undercurrents of pride and corruption surface with fatal consequences, and the lively narrative ends as fate demands that it must. Murder is avenged and avarice thwarted in a novel that verges on allegory and yet transports us to a time and place as solid as the ill-fated rock that brings only disaster.
McGuire achieves a cinematic intimacy by writing the past in the present tense ... Passages of dialogue and interior monologue, rendered in contemporary language, function as soliloquies, revealing the characters’ contrasting natures.
Little mirth or mercy ... Feels antiquated ... McGuire’s men are granted room to ponder grand questions of faith, honour and ambition, how far a conscience can be bent; his women fret about marital harmony and tend to the fire ... Heavy on research, light on imagination ... Bleak and bloody ... A hyper-masculine melodrama, fuelled by grievance and petty tyrannies. If only he had something – anything – interesting to say about women.
