The Moonstone
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The Moonstone
Wilkie Collins
Mystery & Suspense
James Mustich
Jul 31, 2018
While the plot of The Moonstone is compelling, it is the play of its distinctive voices upon our understanding of events that makes the book truly absorbing. Clues are laid out carefully and, in retrospect at least, quite tellingly, but their meaning is obscured as we read by the shifting perspectives and personalities of the narrators. In the same way, the exoticism of the diamond that is the story’s catalyst disguises Collins’s real invention in domesticating the melodrama of the Gothic tale and inviting its titillating energy into recognizable drawing rooms, thus laying the table for Agatha Christie and countless other novelists who would set murderous puzzles close to home. Psychological acuity, formal virtuosity, the social and human amplitude of a Victorian novel, and the narrative pulse of a thriller add up to make The Moonstone the prototype of “the book you can’t put down.”
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Debra Hanff
May 23, 2020
Classic detective fiction.
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