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carolhoggart's review
4.0
A nicely complex and twisty murder mystery set in late fifteenth-century Glasgow. McIntosh creates a very convincing historical setting: she has evidently researched the city, its organisation, and its various occupations and activities in exhaustive detail. Occasionally a little too much such detail is inserted the story, thus slowing the pace, but generally it simply served to provide a wonderfully believable context.
My only real criticism relates to the characters: I wanted them to be more vivid, more distinct from each other (occasionally it was hard to remember who was who), and to have more developed interiority. Perhaps the central character, Gil, has already been developed in McIntosh's earlier books, but I really couldn't get a feel for his personality or motivations in this tale.
But what I loved most of all in The Fourth Crow was the Scots dialogue. McIntosh really knows what she's doing here, at least to my ear. I've recently read an American-authored Scottish romance that caused me prolonged bouts of wincing with its attempt at Scots dialect. The dialogue in The Fourth Crow was by contrast utterly convincing and lovely to read.
My only real criticism relates to the characters: I wanted them to be more vivid, more distinct from each other (occasionally it was hard to remember who was who), and to have more developed interiority. Perhaps the central character, Gil, has already been developed in McIntosh's earlier books, but I really couldn't get a feel for his personality or motivations in this tale.
But what I loved most of all in The Fourth Crow was the Scots dialogue. McIntosh really knows what she's doing here, at least to my ear. I've recently read an American-authored Scottish romance that caused me prolonged bouts of wincing with its attempt at Scots dialect. The dialogue in The Fourth Crow was by contrast utterly convincing and lovely to read.
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