Arthur Tazhitdinov

Took me a long time to finish, which is saying. It's a detective novel set in modern Edinburgh during Art Festival. Technically book is very, very well written, full of background details for a dozen of main characters, but the main plot left me cold, it's just not engaging enough. Also, it's a story that treats every character with russian origin as some kind of “deus ex machina”, I'm getting tired of that.

I expect to enjoy this kind of crime stories much more when I get old, though.

Nicely written, but overall cliche and not very interesting as a detective. Why then I couldn't put this book down?

Very bad writing; no idea how this got nominated for both Nebula and Hugo

The cover is the only redeeming quality of this colossal novel. It’s utterly boring and predictable from beginning to end. I’m almost certain King wrote this one while sleeping.

X-Men in victorian times. Much less exciting than that sounds. Included black&white photos are really great, and they well incorporated into the plot, but the story gets weaker with every page.