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galadhir's review
4.0
Lovely cosy mystery set in Cambridge, after which you will never see quilt-making in the same light again.
smcleish's review
4.0
Originally published on my blog here in November 1998.
A Piece of Justice is the second of Walsh's detective novels to feature Imogen Quy, nurse at St Agatha's, a fictional Cambridge college. As you would expect from a Booker shortlisted author, it is well written, though it doesn't have a particularly difficult puzzle.
Imogen has taken a lodger, a postgraduate student named Fran writing a thesis on the nature of biography. To be able to live while working on this, she asks her supervisor if he has any suggestions of paid work she can do. He offers her the chance to ghost a biography he has been asked to write, of a prominent St Agatha's mathematician, Gideon Summerfield, about to (posthumously) receive the Waymark Prize, the (fictional) mathematical equivalent of the Nobel Prize.
When Fran receives the papers which have been amassed about this man, she and Imogen discover something rather odd. In the rather dull chronology of his life, there is a month which cannot be accounted for. Not only this, but there have been three previous biographers who have begun to work on the project, all of whom have disappeared when they tried to investigate the missing month.
The major characters are well-drawn, and (unusually for genre fiction) even the minor ones are individualised. Only the standard crime novel problem of unbelievable coincidence mars the plot in places.
A Piece of Justice is the second of Walsh's detective novels to feature Imogen Quy, nurse at St Agatha's, a fictional Cambridge college. As you would expect from a Booker shortlisted author, it is well written, though it doesn't have a particularly difficult puzzle.
Imogen has taken a lodger, a postgraduate student named Fran writing a thesis on the nature of biography. To be able to live while working on this, she asks her supervisor if he has any suggestions of paid work she can do. He offers her the chance to ghost a biography he has been asked to write, of a prominent St Agatha's mathematician, Gideon Summerfield, about to (posthumously) receive the Waymark Prize, the (fictional) mathematical equivalent of the Nobel Prize.
When Fran receives the papers which have been amassed about this man, she and Imogen discover something rather odd. In the rather dull chronology of his life, there is a month which cannot be accounted for. Not only this, but there have been three previous biographers who have begun to work on the project, all of whom have disappeared when they tried to investigate the missing month.
The major characters are well-drawn, and (unusually for genre fiction) even the minor ones are individualised. Only the standard crime novel problem of unbelievable coincidence mars the plot in places.
robram's review
2.0
Disappointing! I expected more from this novel, as I had read Knowledge Of Angels by Paton Walsh many years ago.
This sold itself as a kind of Morse-esque detective novel - set in a university town, I thought it would be erudite and clever. Instead, it was dull and bookish.
Read [book:Knowledge Of Angels] if you want to enjoy Paton Walsh's writing. Steer clear of anything that mentions Imogen Quy
This sold itself as a kind of Morse-esque detective novel - set in a university town, I thought it would be erudite and clever. Instead, it was dull and bookish.
Read [book:Knowledge Of Angels] if you want to enjoy Paton Walsh's writing. Steer clear of anything that mentions Imogen Quy
lnatal's review
3.0
Mystery and danger threaten Fran when she takes over the biography of mathematician Gideon Summerfield.
pers's review
4.0
Can't help finding it a tiny bit ironic that I prefer a Cambridge college nurse as protagonist to an Oxford novelist - but I do engage more with Imogen Quy than Kate Ivory.
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