An Instance of the Fingerpost

By Iain Pears

Book Overview

In 1663 Oxford, a servant girl confesses to a murder. But four witnesses--a medical student, the son of a traitor, a cryptographer, and an archivist--each finger a different culprit... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 009975181X
• ISBN13: 9780099751816
• Release Date: January 1998
• Publisher: Riverhead 1998
• Length: 704 Pages
• Weight: 1.04 lbs.
• Dimensions: 7.8" x 1.6" x 5.1"

Customer Reviews

Brilliant!

A dark and yet illuminating journey into the late Cromwellian and early Restoration periods. A time that was rife with royalist plots, tense relations with the Spanish Netherlands and France, differing theologies and philosophies. The author has given us a cast of historical characters alive at the time lending authenticity to the period. It is through the skillful intermingling of these historical personages with the fictitious...

Thematic spoiler ahead (slightly a plot spoiler)

While asserting the value of religion in the face of science in "The Big Picture: what the religions of the world teach us about the nature of ultimate reality", Huston Smith, well-known scholar of comparative religion, decries the way the term "mystery" has been pressed into the service of the literary genre of "whodunnits". I suspect Smith has not come across Pears' "Instance".Unlike other reviewers, I thought the insertion...

Seven Hundred Pages Weren't Enough

I'm not a mystery devotee, nor do I have the patience (or available personal time) to read very many 700 page novels. About every 3 or 4 years though, I find an exception and this (like Umberto Eco's best work) was one of the strongest. At the end of this very cleverly drawn book, I was longing for more, including more information beyond the dramatis personae entries on the main and secondary characters. Before reading...

Tough, but Rewarding

Warning: This is not a pick it up and finish it in a day kind of book. No matter how many historical mysteries you read you will not be able to get through this book in a day, or even several days. That being said, it is one of the most rewarding mysteries you are likely to read. Pears's incredibly detailed depiction of Oxford in the late seventeenth century bristles with life, lust, and treachery. First through the...

Twists of fate make for a genuinely literary mystery novel

This is a long (680 pgs in my paperback edition--bought from A.c, by the way) historical novel set in reformation England-mostly Oxford. The story comprises four distinct memoirs-seemingly written in about 1680-that recall events during 1663. The characters are mostly historical figures-actually two of the narrators are fictitous, two are genuine, while secondary characters include Robert Boyle, James Locke, and other...