Tonight I finished reading The Pull of the Moon by Diane Janes – another of my freebies from Amazon’s Vine programme.  In this case it was a pre-publication uncorrected proof.  I’m not sure why exactly, but I do get a little extra thrill from reading pre-publication proofs, something I possibly do more than most people thanks to having a sister in the book trade.  Mind you, because she lives so far away and we only see each other a few times a year I do often find myself reading pre-publication proofs well after the publication date, but for some reason that doesn’t diminish the pleasure as much as it perhaps should.

In this case, of course, I got the book with an obligation to review it, and here is what I wrote:Because the book does depend on things being disclosed at the right time, in the right order (it is a mystery after all) the review is necessarily circumspect about the story itself.

This book is well outside my comfort zone as I tend not to read mystery books much, but I found it to be extremely readable.

Reflecting afterwards I realise that the main characters were not particularly fleshed-out, but at the time of reading it that was not a problem because I really, really wanted to see what happened next. Once a book gets me wanting to do that I can be very forgiving of it.

As a mystery it is very low-key and domestic, not resorting to anything spectacular to attract attention. The focus of the story is a fifty-something retired teacher who fills her days with swimming and the badminton club which in itself is a little unusual and perhaps quite modern. In my own visualisation of it I pictured Helen Mirren playing Kate in the contemporary sections.

The most impressive aspect of the book for me is the structure of it. The chapters more or less alternate between the current day and an early 70’s summer and both strands run sequentially. Both strands have their own mysteries. In the current thread you want to know whether Kate’s almost-mother-in-law does know anything about her secret, and why she seems to have a hobby as a part-time stalker. In the 70’s story you more or less know what is going to happen, we are already told in chapter one that Danny dies and that Trudie was murdered, even before knowing who they are, but the mystery is about how, when and why these deaths occur.

In this respect the book really teases the reader by giving away the main plot point early on and letting you speculate on the exact circumstances, although even then it manages to spring a few little surprises. There are smaller teases too – when the book looks like it might slip into the supernatural or when Katy (as she called herself back in the 70’s) flicks through Trudie’s diary, reads one very significant entry and has the strength to resist the temptation to read any more. How could she do that? I found myself trying to urge Katy to read the later entries because I wanted to know what was in them.

In practical terms, the book is split into chapter that are mostly around ten pages long, making it very suitable for reading on the train or bus, or perhaps on the beach.

The title, cover, and blurb on the back all made me suspect I wouldn’t enjoy this book and made me put off starting it, but by the third chapter I was hooked.

Another reason why this book was outside my comfor zone, is one I didn’t want to mention on Amazon because it sounds a bit bad without some qualification: it is by a female author.  For some reason, and it is not a deliberate misogynistic policy of mine or anything, I realised a few years ago that out of the many hundreds of fiction books I have, only a handful were by women.

This probably just because I had read most widely in a few genres dominated by male authors and didn’t go near a couple of genres where women authors dominate and seem to concentrate, but it could just me chance.  Or maybe I am being subconsciously sexist?

The strange thing is that in the last couple of years I have probably read more books by female authors that in the thirty years before – but again there was no conscious decision to do that.  A lot of those female-written books have been via Vine.

To my shame, I have still not got round to reading any Austen or Bronte novels.  If I ever hanker for a period piece I still drift towards Dickens and Conan Doyle.