The Cursed Stone. (The Moonstone - Wilkie Collins)

Name: Azurel

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Product:	The Moonstone - Wilkie Collins
Date:	22/05/02 (1075 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: A great detective story that will keep you guessing.

Disadvantages: You'll never guess who it is!

The moonstone is more of a detective story than anything else and is set in the 1840's. The story is about a valuable yellow diamond that was stolen from the forehead of a god. Over the years many people have owned the stone and whoever owns it is said to be cursed. A man comes to own the stone and he bequeaths it to his sisters daughter, Rachel, on her 18th birthday. He knows the stone is cursed and wishes to pass the evil on. Then hours after Rachel has received the Moonstone it disappears and the story goes on to show who stole it and why.

The story itself is told from each characters point of view. This gives the series of events from different points of views that give the story an interesting twist. Wilkie Collin's uses this method of story telling very well. The separate accounts do not seem to be simply repeating the content of the previous ones and different accounts enhance the story rather than repeating it. The different accounts show the series of events from different characters point of view and the characters from each other's point of view. Each character has their own style of prose and this gives the characters distinct and developed personalities.

The book changes pace throughout so the action takes place at varying speeds, It took me a while to get past the first 50 pages or so because the story doesn't really take off at the beginning but once I found myself in the story the rest of the book went by quite quickly and I was sad to have finished such an entertaining and absorbing story. This is the first book by Wilkie Collins that I have read but I think he wrote many other detective stories too, with The Moonstone being one of the most famous.

I found the book enjoyable and quite exciting even though the book is not that fast paced it doesn't seem to drag along. The story changes pace throughout which adds to the overall effect. I enjoyed the different points of view and this definitely added to
the general interest of the story. Even though lots of information is given throughout the story most of it is circumstantial so I found it impossible to guess whom the thief was before the story revealed it. This story flows well and it is an enjoyable detective story, one I'd recommend to everyone even those who don?t usually read classics.

Wilkie Collins was born in 1824 and died in 1889. He is is often referred to as the "grandfather of English detective fiction" and as such can be credited with several "firsts" in plot ideas, some of which are A country house robbery, An "inside job", False suspects and a unexpected final twist in the plot, all of which feature strongly in The Moonstone

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