Review: The Book of Mirrors by E.O Chirovici

I was lucky enough to snag one of the gorgeous proof copies of this book. Massive thanks to Francesca Russell at Cornerstone!

When big-shot literary agent Peter Katz receives an unfinished manuscript entitled The Book of Mirrors, he is intrigued.

The author, Richard Flynn is writing a memoir about his time at Princeton in the late 80s, documenting his relationship with the famous Professor Joseph Wieder.

One night in 1987, Wieder was brutally murdered in his home and the case was never solved.

Peter Katz is hell-bent on getting to the bottom of what happened that night twenty-five years ago and is convinced the full manuscript will reveal who committed the violent crime.

But other people's recollections are dangerous weapons to play with, and this might be one memory that is best kept buried.

Review

There is a lot of hype surrounding this book-although I have to admit that I hadn't heard of it or the author before-so I was eager to see what all the fuss was about. On the face of it we have a 25 year old cold case, a murder brought back to light by a mysterious manuscript. As the literary agent begins to dig, the case gets passed on to a local reporter, then on to an ex-cop who was involved with the original case. It is from the perspective of these three men that we as readers try and piece together what happened on the night of the crime. The ending actually isn't that surprising, but it's the getting there with this case that's interesting. What makes this whodunit different is its focus on psychology and the power of the mind - how it can be manipulated but also how it can manipulate itself. The tag line - 'one man's truth is another man's lie' - is entirely apt at summing up this novel. Is memory fact or fiction? Is a wrongly recollected truth a lie? How reliable exactly is the human mind? As all the witness statements begin to contradict each other, are any of the suspects actually telling the truth? The plot of the murder case is relatively straightforward when the truth is revealed, but it throws up a lot of questions that leave you questioning even your own mind. The Book of Mirrors is a very clever and well written novel (very well written considering that English is not the author's first language). I'm interested to read the inevitable translations of Chiovici's other works.