Once Upon a River

On a winter's evening in 1887, a man bursts into the Swan pub on the Thames with a dead girl in his arms. Half an hour later, the girl is alive again and several characters claim her. Robin Armstrong (more so his father, Robert) who believes she is his missing daughter, abandoned by his ex wife. The Vaughans who believe she is their kidnapped daughter returned to them. And Lily White, who claims to have a deceased sister. All of this is investigated by what I would describe as the protagonist, Rita Sunday, a nurse who knows all the players involved.

The book is very engaging, easy to read, and has a touch of magical realism to it. It's not the kind of thing I normally read and I wasn't entirely blown away. But I could see that it was a fun and entertaining yarn. If you enjoy plot driven books with a style to them that has an element of mystery (like those programmes on Sunday evening about a vicar solving crime (or some other amateur sleuth... there's a million of them) then you'll probably enjoy this. It's not my cup of tea but I found it mostly enjoyable as a read, though I did spend a lot of my time thinking... I could be reading something far more substantial instead of this. Along with the much better Piranesi, it's probably the only other contemporary novel I'll read this year as I'm becoming increasingly unmoved by them. It felt much like all the other contemporary novels I read (and it annoyed me how easily everyone began weeping... at one point, a character wept so much, their sleeve became damp... how?)

Anyway, like I said, if you like plot driven mysteries, you'll probably like this.