Princeton, 1987. Renowned psychologist Professor Joseph Weider is brutally murdered. 25 years later literary agent Peter Katz receives a manuscript that may hold the answers to this previously unsolved crime.

Chirovici has written a very clever book. The plot twists and turns, backtracks and goes round in circles, so you can never be quite sure where it’s going to go next. He plays on the idea of unreliable memories and in doing so poses interesting questions about the nature of remembering and the possibility of manipulating our own memories in order to view things in a better light.

The story is multi-layered and deftly plotted. Each time you think you have solved the case and all your questions have been answered, another witness or another piece of evidence comes to light that throws it all up into the air. The story is told from four different viewpoints, and this structure works well to keep the reader guessing.

Unfortunately, I think the high praise this book has received and the story behind it (this is Romanian author Chirovici’s first book in English and was the subject of a massive bidding war between publishers) raised my expectations too high. I would have preferred not to have known anything about it because I think I would have enjoyed the story more.

The main flaw I found with this book was that there was no sense of danger. When the various protagonists are on the hunt for answers and talking to possible murderers, there is very little tension because it is always made clear that the interviewee isn’t dangerous in any way. There is some tension as the reader tries to figure out what really happened the night Joseph Weider was murdered, but this wasn’t enough to keep me fully engaged.

Chirovici is writing in his second language here so perhaps some flaws can be forgiven, but the writing was little more than average. It was riddled with clichés and the dialogue sounded nothing like real life. The book is billed as a literary thriller but I don’t think the writing was strong enough for it to warrant that title.

The characters were another problem for me. Though the story is told by four different narrators they all sounded identical. There is very little (if any) character development so I found I didn’t care what happened to any of the characters. There were some worn out clichés (hard-drinking detective, anyone?) and the female characters were relegated to the background, given very little to say and do.

The Book of Mirrors is a clever thriller that asks interesting questions about the nature of memory. The structure is the best thing about the story, the way it cleverly unfolds and passes from one narrator to the next. Unfortunately, it lacked passion and suspense.

Many thanks to Penguin for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.