The Moonspinners (by Mary Stewart)

(Amazon UK link)

I have liked Mary Stewart’s mid-century romantic thrillers since I was in my teens, and have been delighted to find many of them in charity shops over the past couple of decades. There were some which I had never read, so I was particularly pleased, in the summer, to discover a relative new edition of three or four of them which I didn’t have, in another charity shop.

I’ve just finished reading ‘The Moonspinners’, and don’t recall ever having read it before. Mary Stewart set several of her books in Greek islands; since I now live in Cyprus, that gives them some added interest. She writes about the places and culture in a way that feels authentic, and not as dated as books set in the 1960s in Western European cultures can. This is no exception, set entirely in Crete.

Nicola is the main protagonist and narrator, and we meet her saying goodbye to some acquaintances before setting off for a new hotel in a remote village. Her cousin Frances was supposed to have joined her, but there have been delays - so Nicola has a day to herself. She speaks reasonably fluent Greek as she works in Athens and she’s a confident young woman.

So she’s a bit surprised to be confronted by an angry man with a knife - and very concerned when she meets an English man called Mark, who has been seriously injured, and appears to be in a feverish, weakened state. Nicola is the kind of person who acts without too much thought, and cares about people; the first person narration works well in that we get inside her head during this story. I found myself liking her very much, while also taking a mental step backwards, shuddering a little, during some of her actions.

It becomes clear that Mark was victimised because he saw a crime, and that even if he recovers from his injury, his life is in serious danger. More worryingly still, his teenage brother Colin is missing - and much of the book involves uncertainty, and growing concern about him.

There’s a tad more description in this book that I’m comfortable with. I have a hard time imagining places and don’t ‘see’ things in my mind’s eye, so geographical explanations leave me entirely at a loss. I can appreciate a bit of colour and useful descriptive references that let me know where the character is, but Nicola’s interest in birds and her cousin’s passion for flowers led to a fair amount of skimming.

Still, it’s a good story. In some of Mary Stewart’s novels we don’t know who the ‘good’ people are until near the end; there’s often an unexpected twist or new uncovering of villainy that I didn’t see coming. In this book it’s more straightforward. Nicola makes some educated guesses which mostly turn out to be correct.

Since it’s narrated in the first person, I knew that Nicola herself was going to come through whatever dangers and disasters might overtake her. But there are some very tense moments when I really didn’t know what was going to happen to other main characters. There’s a lot of fast action in the final chapters, much of which I didn’t really follow (but then I never can follow fast sequences in films - perhaps confusion is intended, to give an impression of panic and fear).

Because it’s Mary Stewart, and because of the era, I was fairly certain things would pan out in the end, so the conclusion was predictable, but well done. The romantic element of this is so low key as to be almost irrelevant, but it leads to a positive and hopeful ending.

All in all I liked this book and look forward already to re-reading it in another ten years or so.

As well as being fairly widely available second-hand, Mary Stewart's books are regularly re-printed, and also available for the Kindle.

Review copyright 2019 Sue's Book Reviews