The Shadow of Death

Last year my DVR picked up the Grantchester series on PBS (you can watch it on Amazon Video now). I’m glad it did as I really enjoyed watching these British mysteries (there were six episodes in the first season; the second season starts in March 2016).

Then a few months ago, my library got the first book in the series, The Shadow of Death, on Kindle so I thought I’d give it a go. It wasn’t what I expected.

First off, I expected that the book would correspond to the first episode in the television series. And it did, sort of. You see the book is written as a series of six short stories that occur over one year in the life of the protagonist, Cannon Sydney Chambers, a priest in the Anglican church, located in a small village (Grantchester) outside of Cambridge. And while the first television episode mirrored the first chapter/short story in the book, not all of them did. There were some short stories not in the first season of the television show and there were some episodes in the television show not in the book. That said, once I realized the set up of the book and reset my expectations, it became easier to read.

Let me explain that too. I found the book a bit hard to read at first for a few reasons:

• the chapter sizes are large (an hour plus worth of reading)
• the language is rich, definitely not a 7th grade reading level, beautiful but not easy
• it was written with a lot of exposition from a third (or narrator) viewpoint.
• there was a lot of time spent on what the characters were thinking or feeling, not a lot of showing. Basically, what you learn about the characters and their motivations, was what the narrator wanted you to learn. As a matter of fact, the creepiest (and almost best part) was during a kidnapping, when the narrator didn’t enter the kidnapper’s head and you are left to judge the kidnapper’s character based upon his words and actions (and they were a bit freaky).

All that said, in the end I’m glad I read the book. However, since the library doesn’t have the second in the series, Sydney Chambers and the Perils of the Night, yet, I’m not sure I’ll rush to pay the almost $9 to read it.