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THE FOREST OF SOULS
by Carla Banks
HarperCollins, March 2005
400 pages
18.99GBP
ISBN: 000719210X


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Historian Helen Kovacs thinks she's found the break of her academic life -- a stash of papers in a private library relating to the Nazi occupation of Eastern Europe. Only snag is, she doesn't live to benefit from the find.

Police assume a strange young man called Nick Garrick, who was caretaker of the remote house where Helen was sifting through the papers, is the murderer. But then Helen's best friend Faith Lange, who had no idea what Helen had discovered, starts retracing her steps.

Lurking around the sidelines is journalist Jake Denbigh, who's showing a great interest in Faith's refugee grandfather Marek. And he's also spending a lot of time with Sophia Yevanova, the mother of Faith's boss Antoni.

Both Faith and Jake make some frightening discoveries about Helen's death and also what happened in the Eastern European concentration camps.

THE FOREST OF SOULS is a chilling thriller exploring a growing and fertile area for the genre -- Eastern Europe. Most of the action takes place in and around Manchester, but the tentacles of Poland and what is now Belarus still stretch out and entangle the participants.

And while it's an intriguing book, it's never what you'd call sprightly. It plods a bit, and for sections not a lot happens -- the menace built up in the early chapters isn't quite realised later. And it suffers from the malaise of too many thrillers -- under-drawn characters who you never quite feel you get to know. This is a significant problem with Faith. I ended up feeling I knew far more about Helen than her friend.

Of the two strands to be gathered up at the end, one comes a surprise; the other is a serious anti-climax -- I had to read it twice to make sure I hadn't missed a twist. But THE FOREST OF SOULS is a book worth the effort, mainly for the chance to look in on a forgotten world, and also for the skilful way in which Banks uses the fairytale format to further her plot.

Reviewed by Sharon Wheeler, February 2005

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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