Customer Reviews
Compelling, addictive and beautifully written - By: J. Bird, 25 Nov 2008 
I took this novel on holiday & ended up walking around the apartment with it, bumping into furniture. I put it down to sleep & to eat, & that's about it. I became horribly unsociable until I'd finished it. I then couldn't,in a home full of books, find one other I wanted to read. Because although I'd closed Ghostheart, the story & the characters hadn't left me.
Roger Ellory's talentin creating real humans, with all their loves, fears, complexities, cruelties & dark corners, is one of the joys of reading his work. I don't know who I'm going to meet next, & I start each one of his novels curious to get to know new people. I may loathe them, they may make me shudder, or I may even, as with this one, fallin love with them. I always remember them. Jack Sullivan, Annie's irascible, booze-soaked but golden-hearted neighbour who adores her, is a wonderful creation.
I found the character of Annie quite entrancing, I could identify with her loneliness & her searching, & I wanted her to find who she was looking for. Will it be the seductive but elusive David Quinn?
There are some teeth-rattling horrorsin Ghostheart, which haven't left me either, starting at Auschwitz & moving forward into the brutal gangland world of Americain the 50s & 60s. All of it has the raw stench of authenticity which made it both difficult, & compulsive, to read. I had to know what happened.
It all works beautifully together, & I loved it.
Memorable Manhattan mystery - By: one-eyed Jack, 02 Sep 2008 Along with many others I have been investingin R J Ellory's back-cataloguein response to his hugely successful fifth novel A Quiet Beliefin Angels. Ghostheart is his second novel, & again it is clear that he has a broad & diverse talent, because he has the unusual ability to tell a talein a different style to all of his others whilst retaining his own indelible signature & personal identity. And this is such an intelligently written story that I felt tempted to read it all over again as soon as I had finished.
Essentially there are three menin the life of central character Annie O'Neill: her friend & neighbour Jack, her new lover David, & her late father Frank O'Neill. And although a huge amount of time is allocated to the two living characters, it gradually emerges that it is her father who is the most influential & who, indirectly, this book is all about despite his having died more than twenty years earlier, when Annie was about seven years old. It's a book about writing; Annie runs a small bookshopin a little lane off West 107th Street, Manhattan, & part of the inventory includes antique & classical publications that are dear to her heart. Despite this being the early part of the 21st century, Annie feels - as one suspects the author does, too - that she doesn't belongin the modern erain a literary sense, feeling a closer connection to the likes of Fitzgerald, Steinbeck & Hemingway than writers of the current time. An elderly man visits her shop with a tale of his own to tell, one which involves gangsters of a bygone generation & a tale that is narratedin occasional pieces within the main body of the story. Soon after Annie starts reading the letters given to her each week by the elderly man, she meets David & is quickly swept off her feet by him & enters into a passionate & blissful love affair. Meanwhile, she shares her rapidly changing life with her trusted friend & neighbour Jack Sullivan, a heavy-drinking Vietnam veteran & journalist nearly twice her age.
Through the eyes, mind & heart of a woman with littlein the way of previous experiencein matters of love & commitment, & who knows a lot less about her late father than she would like, the reader is taken on an odyssey of emotional traumas that encompass both the present & the past, with issues such as love, honesty, trust, heritage & revenge just some of the tests of spirit & resolve that Annie has to endure. Key among these is the drama of discovering that the past life she thought she knew is shockingly differentin reality, & that she has been deceived by those closest to her for her entire life until now.
The realisation of the truth is toldin minute detail, a revelation that covers almost the entire length of the novel, & while the reader might second-guess the outcome, or some elements of it, before Annie does, the conclusion is moving & narrated with great skill & sensitivity. This is a story that I will remember long after closing the final page, a tale expertly & convincingly told despite the preconceived objections some have apparently had, that a British writer should tell a story entirely basedin America, & a man writing through the emotions of a woman. The open-minded will soon realise, as they most likely had done previously with other Ellory novels, that this is a storyteller of exceptional talent & diversity, & also that he is no one-hit-wonder by any means. A Quiet Beliefin Angels may have been the one that everybody has heard about & read, but the truth is that everything that went before - including Ghostheart - is every bit as good.
Across 107th Street - By: one-eyed Jack, 31 Aug 2008 Along with many others I have been investingin R J Ellory's back-cataloguein response to his hugely successful fifth novel A Quiet Beliefin Angels. Ghostheart is his second novel, & again it is clear that he has a broad & diverse talent, because he has the unusual ability to tell a talein a different style to all of his others whilst retaining his own indelible signature & personal identity. And this is such an intelligently written story that I felt tempted to read it all over again as soon as I had finished.
Essentially there are three menin the life of central character Annie O'Neill: her friend & neighbour Jack, her new lover David, & her late father Frank O'Neill. And although a huge amount of time is allocated to the two living characters, it gradually emerges that it is her father who is the most influential & who, indirectly, this book is all about despite his having died more than twenty years earlier, when Annie was about seven years old. It's a book about writing; Annie runs a small bookshopin a little lane off West 107th Street, Manhattan, & part of the inventory includes antique & classical publications that are dear to her heart. Despite this being the early part of the 21st century, Annie feels - as one suspects the author does, too - that she doesn't belongin the modern erain a literary sense, feeling a closer connection to the likes of Fitzgerald, Steinbeck & Hemingway than writers of the current time. An elderly man visits her shop with a tale of his own to tell, one which involves gangsters of a bygone generation & a tale that is narratedin occasional pieces within the main body of the story. Soon after Annie starts reading the letters given to her each week by the elderly man, she meets David & is quickly swept off her feet by him & enters into a passionate & blissful love affair. Meanwhile, she shares her rapidly changing life with her trusted friend & neighbour Jack Sullivan, a heavy-drinking Vietnam veteran & journalist nearly twice her age.
Through the eyes, mind & heart of a woman with littlein the way of previous experiencein matters of love & commitment, & who knows a lot less about her late father than she would like, the reader is taken on an odyssey of emotional traumas that encompass both the present & the past, with issues such as love, honesty, trust, heritage & revenge just some of the tests of spirit & resolve that Annie has to endure. Key among these is the drama of discovering that the past life she thought she knew is shockingly differentin reality, & that she has been deceived by those closest to her for her entire life until now.
The realisation of the truth is toldin minute detail, a revelation that covers almost the entire length of the novel, & while the reader might second-guess the outcome, or some elements of it, before Annie does, the conclusion is moving & narrated with great skill & sensitivity. This is a story that I will remember long after closing the final page, a tale expertly & convincingly told despite the preconceived objections some have apparently had, that a British writer should tell a story entirely basedin America, & a man writing through the emotions of a woman. The open-minded will soon realise, as they most likely had done previously with other Ellory novels, that this is a storyteller of exceptional talent & diversity, & also that he is no one-hit-wonder by any means. A Quiet Beliefin Angels may have been the one that everybody has heard about & read, but the truth is that everything that went before - including Ghostheart - is every bit as good.
Good editor needed! - By: A reader, 26 Aug 2008 
Was expecting something amazing from this much-praised author but while the story did eventually grab me, I felt the book could use a good editor. There are a few inconsistencies which distract from the flow of the story & several almost cringingly long-winded passages describing what is going onin Annie's head. Most of the book is well written which only makes the bad bits seem especially jarring.
A tale of human longing and cruelty - By: Aran, 12 Jun 2008 This is a wonderful book & has literally so many ingredients (love, betrayal, stark violence, gangsterism, nazi death camps) you would be hard put to fit the story into a genre ; crime? historical saga? love story? One thing is sure, you cannot put it down. This is what the more learned amongst us call "Serious Popular Fiction", I suppose. I read about 52 books a year. My means of evaluating a books' worth is simple : I ask myself "Was it good?". Well, this one was excellent. As a fan of "serious" fiction, I am aware that "crime" fiction is often seen as the poor cousin of literature. Forget that snobbery, this is a brilliantly told story. It is moving, shocking, funny, sad and, above all, rivetting. I fellin love with Annie O'Neill (note to self : hide these comments from wife). I feel lucky. I've just bought all his books & this was my first one to read. I've still got four to go. Yoohoo!!!
