Philip Kerr’s 'Dark Matter - The Private Life of Sir Issac Newton'
• Alex Grant

---

Kerr’s new and eleventh book DARK MATTER THE PRIVATE LIFE OF SIR ISAAC NEWTON is a pluperfect historical yarn which posits Sir Isaac Newton as a Seventeenth Century forerunner of Arthur Conan Doyle’s 19th century sleuth ‘Sherlock Holmes’.

In 1696 Newton was the Warden of The Royal Mint ensconced within the notorious blood-soaked Tower of London. To serve as his bodyguard and amanuensis Sir Isaac employs bellicose ignoramus ‘Christopher Ellis’ a swordsman in both senses of the word, but wetter behind the ears than a harbour seal pup- yet he proves a quick study under the tuition of the Warden. DARK MATTER is such an enjoyable fantasy choc-a-bloc with incident and extraordinary facts about the British currency of the era that the less committed to paper by me the better. Its trajectory a multi-layered period paranoid conspiracy thriller is entirely admirable.

Scots crime-mystery-suspense writer Philip Kerr's most celebrated for his BERLIN NOIR trilogy of the late 80's and earky 90's, featuring the detective ‘Bernie Gunther’ a moral man struggling to seek justice within the maelstrom of Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich.The three books are MARCH VIOLETS, THE PALE CRIMINAL and A GERMAN REQUIEM (1991).

© Alex Grant November 2002

More Reviews

< Back to Index
< Reply to this Article

© Hackwriters 2002