The Yard Alex Grecian Review

Reviews from the american library assoc.

The yard alex grecian review.

An utterly gripping tale perfectly evokes victorian london and brings you right back to the depraved and traumatic days of jack the ripper. Review by barbara clark june 11 2012 one of the lasting attractions of alex grecian s debut historical crime novel the yard is the fascinating way it lets readers in on the dramatic differences and particulars of another era without seeming ponderous or lecture y. Consider the yard putnam 26 95 a crude corrective to those literary leanings. S lick and sick is how fictional serial killers generally come these days but not in debut novelist alex grecian s historical thriller the yard where the murderer stumbles from killing to.

I have just finished reading a book called the yard by alex grecian. Alex grecian has given us a solid bit of insight into the early days of scotland yard and the development of police work as we know it today. Alex grecian s the yard is a brilliantly crafted debut novel with unforgettable characters. And i mean that in the best possible way lisa lutz author of the spellman files.

Grecian has a fine flexible curious voice and the yard looks as if it could be the start of a promising series. It s set in london in 1889 and is a novel about the early days of the murder squad. The writing style of alex grecian literally transports you back to those victorian days of england but not into the lives of the upper crust but into the lives of the london working class and the poor. I can tell you that for any women reading this book it may make you a bit squeamish at times and is not for the faint hearted.

Read it only for the hilarity of the wrongness of half his descriptions and his totally tin ear for period dialogue. Grecian imaginatively imparts a contemporary sensibility to the legendary tale and illustrator rossmo s tone is decidedly different from the whimsy of picture book versions booklist online. Grecian creates a large and eccentric cast of characters including a detective inspector who can t stop making jokes usually bad puns a mentally disturbed dancing man a brutal tailor whose telltale shears are used in untoward ways the seductive wife of a doctor and two coldblooded prostitutes now perpetrators of crime rather than victims.