This is not the first story we’ve had lately that takes a Fantasy setting and set a murder-mystery within it – see also Richard Swan’s The Justice of Kings (reviewed HERE.)
However, that is where the similarities end. This one does have a Pride & Prejudice level of costumery and a complex set of social moirés, not to mention a feeling like it is set in ancient Bavaria, but also has the novel set-up that this is a place where two souls share time in the same body.
From the publisher: “In this world, two souls inhabit a single body, one by day, one by night. But though they live alongside one another, their ends do not always align. For Special Inspector Morden, whose hunt for a dangerous witch takes him far from home, this will be a problem…
Christophor Morden lives by night. His day-brother, Alexsander, knows only the sun. They are two souls in a single body, in a world where identities change with the rising and setting of the sun. Night-brother or day-sister, one never sees the light, the other knows nothing of the night.
Early one evening, Christophor is roused by a call to the city prison. A prisoner has torn his eyes out and cannot say why. Yet worse: in the sockets that once held his eyes, teeth are growing. The police suspect the supernatural, so Christophor, a member of the king’s special inspectorate, is charged with finding the witch responsible.
Night-by-night, Christophor’s investigation leads him ever further from home, toward a backwards village on the far edge of the kingdom. But the closer he gets to the truth, the more his day-brother’s actions frustrate him. Who is Alexsander protecting? What does he not want Christophor to discover?
And all the while, an ancient and apocalyptic ritual creeps closer to completion…”
Although set in the 18th century, this feels like it has wandered out of the realms of the medieval, before the Renaissance. The world is grim and full of shadows, although there are attempts to leaven this a little. People still clearly fear the supernatural, and witchcraft is abroad.
Through this, our characters wander, with Christophor as the night-brother being appropriately dark, intense and broody as the King’s Special Inspector, whilst Alexsander is the more personable, likeable, even hedonistic musician that we see during the day. The differences between the “day character” and the “night character” are well done, showing an uneasy relationship between the two characters. Christopher’s uncomfortableness with social situations is mildly amusing.
But, whilst it was entertaining, the basic premise of two people sharing space did not quite work for me.
There’s a lot of practical elements that seem impossible, or at least unworkable, though Towsey does his best to cover the basics without going into too much detail. I couldn’t help feeling though that as entertaining as it was, the idea doesn’t really work. There are practical issues.* In addition, not everywhere in this world has such relationships, so I was left wondering over the bigger issues – how has this situation come about, and why? None of this is explained, and whilst you could just accept it as “it just is”, I felt that it was a situation that doesn’t really work.
Nevertheless, the murder mystery aspect is well done, if rather gruesome. Horse-lovers will be particularly revolted by one part of the story, whilst others will just be creeped out by the fact that the victim had teeth growing inside their eye-sockets. (My check of the Unexplained magazine shows me that this was an actual thing once upon a time.) The good news is that by the end of the book the mystery is eventually unravelled and (perhaps unsurprisingly) there is more to this than a mere murder.
In short, this is an original read, and an intelligent one, but has limitations that hampered my overall enjoyment**. I can’t say I disliked it, but there were elements that left me thinking more about the impracticalities than the main plot, which lessened my liking. It was good to read a one-off novel, which could be expanded to more, but for me it was a singularly interesting, if flawed, experiment.
Equinox by David Towsey
Head of Zeus, May 2022
316 pages
ISBN: 978-1801101646
Review by Mark Yon
*Example 1: The characters take a drug called ettienne to transition between the two souls. What happens if people do not have this drug? Where does it come from? Who pays for it?
**Example 2: what happens during Winter when there is more dark than light, and in Summer where vice-versa? What happens in those places near the Poles where it can be 24 hours a day light or darkness?
