Hawksmoor by Peter Ackroyd

Hawksmoor (Penguin Street Art) (Abacus Books)

by Peter Ackroyd

'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.

Reviewed by adastra on

1 of 5 stars

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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.

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  • Started reading
  • 1 December, 2014: Finished reading
  • 1 December, 2014: Reviewed