Another Space in Time

To me, this novella is is more to do with extreme emotions in the one being, the author, than a romance between two characters. I read it as a mix of mystical realism and autobiographical mystical soul searching. I see it as a bipolar study of good versus evil personality traits, and an exploration of the inherent dangers in drawing back together compartmentalised emotional states. The prose is richly descriptive, but in places strangely inconsistent, almost as though the words were arriving on the paper through mystical translation from some other language. I couldn't decide whether the line editor was poor, or if the occasionally strange word choice was a deliberate attempt to reflect thoughts arriving from some half seen other place. Perhaps Jay suffered the indignity of having the original voice distorted rather than clarified by the edit. The book is well-worth reading, though not so much with the expectation of romance, but rather as a quasi-religious dialogue in wh...

I enjoyed this read very much. There are all the usual elements of the whodunit murder thriller, with a good range of twists and blind alleys. I particularly like the main character, the early retired academic trying something a bit different. He seems to me to be a very plausible stoical, rather than heroic, figure that I had a natural affinity with. The heavy hand of the law, the presumptions of guilt or innocence and the tensions around the distribution of family money are the bread and butter of the crime genre. These elements and others are very well employed with varying degrees of originality. There is enough in the plot for one to be able to get shadows of the ending and yet still be surprised. Agatha Christie, eat your heart out. Here is a modern writer with a similar flare for building plot that encourages the reading into stereotypical thinking and assumptions, only to then turn many elements on there heads. I will be intrigued to see whether Mackey can maintain the art o...