From the Bookshelf of Around The World…

[close] At first I wasn't sure exactly what genre this book fell into...paranormal...missing person...historical...? Actually it was a little of all of those with a great deal of total mystery thrown in. It all began with a young child of the village discovering an eye-ball in a birds nest and the disappearance of a mother, father and a toddler.

The black country is an isolated and bleak part of the British countryside where old legends and superstitions still abound. This is the atmosphere that greeted Inspector Walter Day and his Sergeant Nevil Hammersmith when called from London to help locate the missing family. As in most of these types of books...nothing is easy. A blinding, three day blizzard...a village that is daily sinking into the numerous coal mine shafts that run for miles under the village...over 100 mysteriously ill villagers and the presence of death in the form of a mysterious American soldier all combine to make the task of finding anyone almost impossible.

The reader will quickly love the two London detectives...begin to hate the villagers...mistrust everyone and wait to see if they were right about what really happened to the family. The book lost a star for me because of the long, drawn out path to the conclusion that you had more than likely guessed 100 pages prior to the ending. Overall...it was a solid 4 star book and I will certainly read another.