'There is no Light without Darknesse
and no Substance without Shaddowe'
So proclaims Nicholas Dyer, assistant to Sir Christopher Wren and the man with a commission to build seven London churches to stand as beacons of the enlightenment. But Dyer plans to conceal a dark secret at the heart of each church - to create a forbidding architecture that will survive for eternity. Two hundred and fifty years later, London detective Nicholas Hawksmoor is investigating a series of gruesome murders on the sites of certain eighteenth-century churches - crimes that make no sense to the modern mind . . .
'Chillingly brilliant . . . sinister and stunningly well executed' Independent on Sunday
Peter Ackroyd was born in London in 1949. A novelist, biographer and historian, he has been the literary editor of The Spectator and chief book reviewer for the The Times, as well as writing several highly acclaimed books including a biography of Dickens and London: The Biography. He lives in London.
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.
