Hawksmoor (Penguin Street Art) (Abacus Books)

by Peter Ackroyd

In the aftermath of the great fire, eighteenth-century London is a city of extremes. Squalor and superstition vie with elegance and reason as brilliant architect, Nicholas Dyer, is commissioned to build seven new churches. They are to stand as beacons of the Enlightenment - but Dyer plans to conceal a dark secret at the heart of each one. Two hundred and fifty years later, in the same vast metropolis, a series of murders occur on the sites of those same churches. Detective Nicholas Hawksmoor investigates, but the gruesome crimes make no sense to the modern mind...Combining thriller, ghost story and metaphysical tract, "Hawksmoor" won the Whitbread Book Award and "Guardian" Fiction Prize in 1985.

• ISBN10: 0140171134
• ISBN13: 9780140171136
• Publish Date: 25 March 1993 (first published 23 September 1985)
• Publish Status: Out of Print
• Out of Print: 6 April 2010
• Publish Country: GB
• Imprint: Penguin Books Ltd
• Format: Paperback (B-Format (198x129 mm))
• Pages: 224
• Language: English

Reviews

[adastra]

This is a terrible book. I have stared at its 270 pages without actually being able to read them. It's just so abysmally written than I could not grasp it at all. My mind would just slip after a sentence or two, and eventually I would notice that my eyes had just moved over another page full of words without knowing what they contain.

What I got from this book: there are two blokes named Nicholas, one is a dull satanist who builds churches with a secret ingredient in the 1710s, and one who investigates murders in those churches in the 1980s. In the end of the book, they merge into one single space-time paradoxical freak. That's all that happens. Now you know it all. Don't bother reading the book.