An Instance of the Fingerpost

⚖The case for it

Four narrators tell four versions of a murder in 1660s Oxford. Each account undermines the last. Rashomon meets Restoration England.

— the canon

✕The case against

Four narrators means hearing the same events four times, and the first account runs two hundred pages before you understand why you should care. Patience with Restoration medicine and Oxford scholarly feuds is the price of admission. Then the final narrator swerves the whole machine toward religious miracle, and the meticulous mystery you signed up for dissolves into something stranger.

— the honest librarian