Suzi

Absolutely brilliant!!

This was such a unique book and I absolutely loved everything about it.

The audiobook is the way to go with this one, the narration and voices done by Jeff Hays made this such a great experience and I'll be getting to the next one ASAP.

It's clear this is incredibly well researched, and a lot of this was interesting, but it was SO detailed (about the fair and its construction) it became dry and tedious by the end.

There was far less about Holmes, which was the more interesting side of the book, but I imagine there is less known factually about him and his deeds.

I was a bit confused about why these 2 threads were even in the same book, there's no link between Holmes' killings and the World Fair apart from being in the same city at the same time.

From the amount of good things I've heard about this I expected more, but it was overly long and a bit dry for my liking.

Not what I was expecting but I'm glad I went in blind and just let myself be carried along by the story. Definitely odd, but in a good way. It feels like the type of book that people will get different things from, for a small book there are a lot of things to connect to.

This was great! Amazing characters and brilliant horror scenes.

I did have some gripes in that there were some loose ends which weren't tied up so I still had some questions by the end, and I felt like the kids should have been aged up a bit. It felt a bit unbelievable that these kids doing all these things are only 11.

The writing was easy and comfortable, it was paced well so quite a quick read for a 600+ pages horror book.

I can safely say the last ~40% was outstanding, everything from Vorgossos onwards was impossible to stop reading/listening to.

If the whole book had been that gripping this would have been an easy 5 stars, however I did struggle a bit with the first half of the book. The pace was much slower and sloggy, and I felt disconnected with the story after the large time jump after EoS.

I've read other reviews/posts saying the second half of the book is indicative of the rest of the series, so I'll definitely be continuing but I did unfortunately struggle with a lot of this one.