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This is a puzzling book, in more ways than one. I picked a copy up at Novacon, and started to read it a couple of days ago. It's a story about an elderly women (Alma Montague) returning to her hometown, a small town in Mississippi, in order to restore the family mansion and then live out the rest of her days in peace. But nothing is quite as it seems. Who is the mysterious Mr Dark? Why does he give her a key that only she can see, and what is the land that she finds when she uses it, peopled with the dead (but also visited by some of the living) and shifting unnervingly between the past, present, and future?

Having read the first hundred or so pages I was intrigued enough to look the book up on Amazon, only to find that neither it nor the author exist. Neither on Amazon.co.uk nor on Amazon.com. I then googled, and discovered that G A Kathryns is a pen-name of Gael Baudino, and as far as I can tell there are no other works under that name. I've never actually read anything by Gael Baudino, and I don't know if anyone would recommend them. [Going back, if you put the ISBN number into Amazon it not only recognises the book but offers you a number for sale in the Marketplace. This must be Amazon being crap, then.]

So, I've finished the book, and I'm still baffled. I mean, yes, obviously, it's about the approach of death and reconciliation to it, but there are an awful lot of plot strands that aren't finished off. Was there intended to be a sequel? Am I being dense and just not spotting that the answers are all there in the text? In which case please would someone explain to me what is going on with Mrs Gavin and Magic, and a couple of other things that I can't describe for fear of giving away the plot.

Would I recommend it? Cautiously. It's well written, and what's going on is interesting, though baffling. She seems to me to be very good at describing the tensions and odd relationships between white and black people in a small town in Mississippi, so that's worth reading it for. Overall I enjoyed reading it. I wouldn't say it was a must read, but good if you like that sort of thing.