It is Sebastian Becker's job to investigate wealthy patrons and report to the Bethlehem Hospital his professional opinion of their capability to continue to manage their affairs. One of his patients, rich landowner Sir Owain Lancaster, becomes the focus of this book, as events cover a scientific trip down the Amazon gone horribly wrong, mysterious murders of children, and an elusive monster that is affecting brilliant minds and sending them to mental asylums.
Despite the fantastic premise, I can't say I enjoyed this book much. Once the main plot had been introduced, not much happened; in fact a lot of time was spent going over similar conversations with the same conclusions. And the final reveal - coming, as it did, after such extraordinary elements - left me quite under whelmed.
What kept me going was the relationships between some of the characters and some really interesting conversations: the way Sebastian's son, Robert, deconstructs the events at Amazon and decrees where reality ends and fantasy begins ... Sir Owain's attempts at questioning his own mind and his little experiment on Sebastian ... conversations with Doctor Somerville - who was part of the original Amazon expedition - in an attempt to reconstruct the murder of his sister ... moments like these kept my interest in the story alive, more than the main narrative.
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