Sixteen Horses

Product Information

Rechercheur Alec Nichols wordt naar een plaats delict in een weiland van Well Farm geroepen in Ilmarsh.

The description of the failing sea-side resort and the burned-out pier all resonate with places that many people will have been to. He is helped by a forensic veterinarian, Dr Cooper Allen, an outsider initially brought in for 4 days. The chapters also jump around a bit in terms of time and POV, and although I feel like I'm a fairly seasoned crime fiction reader, I found myself needing to rewind to various parts for clarification. I don't mean the killer but the others who felt like outcasts (and oddly enough that includes the Detective).At the point where I gave the book one last chance, the anthrax twist began which helped to keep me reading until the end. ILMARSH is a long-forgotten pleasure town, a place left to its own decay, devoid of anything new or exciting, a ghost town where every single thing is just waiting to fade into oblivion. It charts the familiarity of disenfranchisement for the people who live in Ilmarsh and we all know that familiarity breeds contempt.

The mystery element is what kept me reading and I managed to finish this one, despite the actual reveal and the motivations behind it being utterly unsatisfying and it left me shaking my head at it.It would be a spoiler to go into it too deeply but I was struggling to unpick the final conflict in the story (I'm sure it's me not paying proper attention and that I should read it again but that's not going to happen). There’s an instant attraction when they meet at a party, but he later realises that he has met her before – her son, Tom, is the child of Alex’s teenage partner-in-crime, Clay, who was killed before the boy was born. Sixteen Horses, Greg Buchanan’s debut novel is affecting, challenging, haunting and compelling and I can tell you now that he is an author to watch out for.

Whilst written in third person, the POV does shift between quite a few different characters and after a while they all start to merge together. It mostly made sense within the story and it wasn't ever dwelled on in a particularly gruesome manner, so to me it made a point of difference in a world of same/same crime. One of my recent purchases, it was the striking cover that first caught my attention then the description pulled me in completely- Sixteen Horses pulls off a literary magic trick, it really is like nothing you’ve read before. On the outskirts of Ilmarsh is Well Farm and it is here where the book opens, with DS Alec Nicholls examining the sixteen horses heads which have been partially buried in the fields, one eye exposed to the elements. Gone to the horses instead of the dogs a sea side town on a mountain of madness from 16 horse heads to poetry, lost people, this no All creatures great and small style vet story.

Greg Buchanan’s Sixteen Horses is ‘existentially depressing as only a drizzly afternoon in a dying English seaside town can be’. While a 14-minute delay to a race ordinarily might have no effect on the horses, it was the timing of it – after the horses had been saddled – which was critical. Dat de hele wereld lyrisch is over het boek en er gevochten is over de rechten om het te verfilmen, begrijp ik niet. Twist the block one way and it's all sparkles; twist it another and a horse's eye is looking at you.

Greg studied English at the University of Cambridge and completed a PhD at King’s College London in identification and ethics. In the previous nine years there were a total of 17 who fell or were unseated over the first two fences. A story of enduring guilt, trauma and punishment, set in a small seaside community the rest of the world has left behind .If they can help me feel the emotions I need to feel in the moment, I immediately switch to writing and try and capture my own version of those feelings on the page. Corruption, self-interest and the considerable gap between law and justice rear their heads in Ajay Chowdhury’s debut novel. But, those who do read it will be richly rewarded with an impressive debut novel which I promise you won’t regret.