very slow at first but picks up pace at end
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This is very well written; easy to read but completely believable and convincing. I did find the plot very very slow for the most part but when the story did start, it was great. I liked the genre. Although, I found the story slow, I will certainly read other Merrily Watkins books.
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Who'd have thought life in a Herefordshire village could be so gripping
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Superbly written, thoroughly enjoyable, and a plot that just keeps on developing right up to the end. You do have to stick with it a bit to begin with but once the story really gets going it's great stuff. This was my first Rickman, and I was very impressed.
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Addictive reading
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I have followed the Merrily Watkins series with interest and have enjoyed every single one of them, A strange sort of heroine and so unsure of herself, but her daughter Jane and old Gomer Parry are always on hand when things go wrong. All kinds of superstitions are looked at with this series and anyone who looks this kind of thing might like books by Frances Gordon as well who takes old fairy tales and gives them a VERY modern twist
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Pink Moon is gonna get ye all
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Rickman seduces you into his sleepy, pastoral village of Ledwardine with promises of home brewed cider and fairies at the bottom of the orchard. Only when it's too late for the reader/listener to catch the last bus home does he scratch away the surface to reveal the sordid underbelly of English country life doused in incest, blood-feuds, rape and murder.
This, the first of the Merrily Watkins procedurals is a ghost story wrapped inside a mystery and bound tightly together with the twine of dark folklore. It also delivers a plot twist that gives the sort of jolt you would normally only expect from a gibbet trapdoor.
As always Rickman's dialogue is a joy as he fleshes out the various suicidal dreamers, quirky eccentrics and sexual predators who inhabit his strange little village. As Nick Drake, the quintessential lost soul himself, who makes an eerie cameo role in the book says - The Pink Moon is gonna get you all!
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Not bad.
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Although I quite enjoyed the first third of the book (perhaps in anticipation) I found myself getting rather bored at times with a story which is supposed to be 'entralling'. The charachters seem unrounded, Merrily remained totally unconvincing throughout and I agree with another reader who thought that Jane should have been the protagonist - she seemed to me to be the most convincing personality. The plot as a whole was well thought out but the quick scene changes is distracting and you never seem to have time to really 'get into' a scene before you're whipped off someplace else with the focus on other characters. I realise this technique is used to create tension but it failed for me here! The play -in -the- church scene was a complete let down after the countless pages leading up to it!
Not a bad read but nothing to get excited about!
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