Responding to a cryptic summons to a remote country house, London bookseller Isaac Inchbold finds himself responsible for restoring a magnificent library pillaged during the English Civic War, and in the process slipping from the surface of 1660s London into an underworld of spies and smugglers, ciphers and forgeries.
As he assembles the fragments of a complex historical mystery, Inchbold learns how Sir Ambrose Plessington, founder of the library, escaped from Bohemia on the eve of the Thirty Years War with plunder from the Imperial Library. Inchbold's hunt for one of these stolen volumes - a lost Hermetic text - soon casts him into an elaborate intrigue; his fortunes hang on the discovery of the missing manuscript but his search reveals that the elusive volume is not what it seems and he has been made an unwitting player in a treacherous game.

Already have a copy of this sitting (way down!) in my TBR pile, so when I spotted this copy at the Theatre Royal book sale recently, I nabbed it specifically for BookCrossing, 'cos now I can release this one and don't have to feel guilty about the other one still sitting waiting to be read after nearly 7 months!

Received from Mothercat at tonight's meetup. Strangely enough, it's destined for a spot several books down in my TBR pile :-)

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I was disappointed by this book - it looked so interesting, but just failed to deliver. I'm not really sure what I didn't like about it: part of it was because it changes from first person to third person in alternate chapters, but the voice it's written in doesn't change enough to easily tell whose point of view you're reading, so it gets a bit confusing sometimes; part of it was because the 17th century setting isn't quite accurate (I'm not enough of a scholar to be able to pick out any specific errors, but a lot of the details just didn't feel quite right to me), and the author hasn't quite decided whether or not he wanted to fully modernise the language of the characters; but I think mostly it was because it just didn't really grip me - I wasn't interested enough in any of the characters to want to keep track of the convoluted plot. It was probably a bad sign that I was rushing to read the last third of this book not because I was wanting to find out what happened, but because I really just wanted to get it over and done with and get to the next book in my TBR pile.

Readable, but not great.

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It's mine!!!!! Hah,hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!

According to the blurb, this book is in seventeenth-century Europe, which seems odd, because it is right next to my elbow. The left one. Elbow, not seventeenth-century Europe. Left seventeenth-century Europe, which is next to Bristol.