It is written in four sections, each in the first person, and each from the point of view of a different character.
The victim is a professor who runs afoul of a bottle of spirits dosed with arsenic the accused killer is a poor but defiantly smart young woman who is denounced as a wench, a whore, and a witch and the catch - and it’s a whopper - is that Fingerpost is actually four contradictory tales, and all the accounts of the killing are offered by narrators who are variously self-deluded, self-protective, and so unreliable that from the novel’s first sentence on, anything you read may be a lie. An Instance of the Fingerpost is a murder mystery, set in Oxford in the 1660s, shortly after the death of Cromwell and the restoration of the Monarchy. Pears’ An Instance of the Fingerpost (if you think the title is a little too teasingly obscure for its own good, wait until you get a load of the novel) is a brimmingly detailed, dauntingly complex stink-and-squalor tour of 17th-century Oxford, with a murder as its chugging motor. An Instance of the Fingerpost is the moment that marks the discovery of an inviolable truth in the cause of an investigation. AN INSTANCE OF THE FINGERPOST Iain Pears (Riverhead, $27) Fans of such mystery/history hybrids as The Name of the Rose and The Alienist, pull up your chairs and settle in for a long, long wallow amid the pseudoscience, superstition, voodoo, gender relations, class structure, and politics of Restoration England. IAIN PEARS is the author of the best sellers An Instance of the Fingerpost, The Dream of Scipio and Stone’s Fall, and a novella, The Portrait, as well as a series of acclaimed detective novels, a book of art history, and countless articles on artistic, financial and historical subjects.
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