Golden
Night
Sophie
is busy preparing an exhibition at the museum she works at, and she’s less than
thrilled when a high-handed detective first denies her entry, then has a few
problems believing she is who she says she is. Things don’t exactly improve
when Sophie discovers the detective’s presence is due to an attempted robbery.
Luckily, Tommy is perfectly reasonable when you get to know him, and soon
they’re working together to solve a 200 year old mystery. But someone else is
on the trail, and Sophie and Tommy are just slightly in the way.
Golden Night is BookByYou’s only original mystery novel (so far), and it’s a fascinating story. It might be more like a thriller than a typical mystery novel, but you could say the same about The Secret Adversary, and that might be my favourite book in the whole world (and a book I might not have discovered without BookByYou).
Unlike the fictional Sophie, I’m not really
an art and museums person, but this wasn’t a problem. The unnamed writer gives
you information that you need in order to understand what’s going on, but
without going into unnecessary boring detail.
The book is fast-paced and
exciting (there are a few chapters involving a plane ride which caused me great
difficulties in the simple matter of putting the book down), there is always a
lot going on, and the only disappointment was that there was no romance between
Sophie and Tommy.
There was nothing to suggest there would be
a romance, it was just an assumption I made based on the other BookByYou novels
I’d read, but I was really looking forward to snogging Tommy Beresford’s face
off. But the book works perfectly well without a romance, and there is a hint
there might be a sequel, so maybe the fun stuff is still to come!
Sophie’s colleagues include a Verne and an
Edith Chadwick, so if you’re called Edith and the guy of your dreams is called
Verne, this probably isn’t the personalised book for you (but buy it anyway and
put your friends in it). The painter in the book is called Edward Lowry
(presumably no relation to L. S. Lowry) and there’s also a Matthew Spicer, but
they’re not referred to by their first names alone, so it shouldn’t matter if
you call your sexy detective after a certain sexy vampire or a certain sexy
Welsh actor.
There is a really lovely moment at the end
with one of the other characters, but I can’t really tell you what it is
without ruining the book a bit. So read it and find out for yourself, okay?
