Rating:  -
After I finished reading it, purposely, I put the book aside for three days, waiting to see how I really feel about it. Now, still, all I want to say is that this is a good book. I admire the author's talent imagination, which turn a dull apologue into a graphic and iridescent melodrama. The writing is so excellent, so stylish, with its vividly detailed descriptions throughout the book. It presents various tableaux viands of French societies over one hundred years ago and nowadays, although the descriptions, if not too prolix, seem lavish sometimes to a certain extent. The French phrases popping up here and there bother me not in the slightest, though. Instead, it brings me into those very surroundings and moments. Imagining you're walking on an alien land, not understanding what people talk, either you have to do your guesswork or you skip it. Or, just choose to listen to those who speak in your own language, so you still survive. And you got your adventuring! So I think the author's authenticating effort is but to bringing us such an experience.
In the book, while Victor Constant, the negative character is depicted meaningfully as being most facinorous, Léonie Vernier, the heroine, whose hamartia led to the whole tragedy, could be much more profoundly explored in a greater extent. My personal feeling is that such a character should have paid more as atonement for the consequences her folly and obstinacy had caused than what had been arranged for the ending.
The plots are coherent, not strictly of typical realism, particularly at the end, but fairly reasonable on the whole. Undoubtedly, the author has done a tremendous amount of research work on tarot cards, on history, so we get a genre painting of France that we could only imagine for the past.
Rating:  -
I don't know, maybe I have super powers or something because I was able to predict exactly what was going to happen in this book one to two hundred pages before it actually happened. I found the characters to be as two-dimensional as tarot cards; the lovers love, justice is just, and the villans are villanous. The story line plods down the path like an old milk-horse, and the path it's on is straight and flat. I have no problem with lyrical descriptions, but I could have gotten more suspense from reading an article in a travel magazine.
Rating:  -
I love intellectual thrillers. What could be better than to open the book and look for clues to the mysteries in a mix of a historical and literature references? Add to this a huge dose of occult, some romantic love, a lot of French fleur and you sure will have a book that is impossible to put down. The recipe is definitely one that is used in "Sepulchre".
However, after finishing the book I felt that most ingredients were overused here.
To begin with, I love French history, got my four-week "French for beginners" class and I don't mind occasional French phrases in the text (especially when they are translated at the bottom of the page). The implicit editor's assumption, however, is that all "Sepulchre" readers are fluent in French, so they would not mind getting French phrases thrown at them on each page and in every second dialogue. Wrong guess; it's actually very annoying.
The story begins in Paris and then moves to the Carcassones region, with the direct and indirect references to "Da Vinci Code", that were not essential distractions from the plot. Murders of the 19 century are linked to today's crimes; the supernatural forces of Tarot cards are strangely related to the music; life of Claude Debussy turns out to be connected to the main heroine's life. This is enough to keep the readers on top of their seats. The rest ... it does look like space filler.
Finally, all the mysteries have been solved at least a hundred pages before the end; there was really no need to drag the plot for so long. I don't even mind a romantic ending, Nora Roberts' style (OK, I admit, I liked it). Still, the book could have lost a third of its volume without any harm to the story.
Rating: -
This book was absolutely wonderful. I was sad to see it come to an end. What a fantastic journey. I can't wait to read Kate Mosse's next book.
Rating:  -
"Sepulchre" has an ominous and chilling opening, an action-packed first few chapters with such rich historical detail and so many compelling characters, the plot could have gone in several directions. Smart, well researched, heavily layered; this was almost a perfect literary thriller. It missed the mark by a (copper colored) hair.
Like A. S. Byatt's "Possession", the genre's gold standard, "Sepulchre" links the nineteenth century and the present day. A deck of tarot cards, some faded photographs and a mysterious piece of music are clues to a puzzle that begins in 1891 and ends in 2007. I was fortunately and immediately hooked by the vivid 19th century tale, which kept me going through the rather lackluster and hurried romance of the contemporary story in which the hero was unengaging, the baddie predictable and as long as we're nitpicking, just how many times DID Meredith "grab a sandwich"?
The imbalance continues to the end. While the 19th century tale ends with a wildly satisfying mob of torch wielding villagers, the contemporary story ends with all questions answered. It's a little too pat. Since the internet plays a part in this book, why doesn't Meredith use it to do some geneological research much earlier in the story? And wouldn't it have been fun if Ms. Mosse had left a few ends loose so she could write the stories only hinted at?
A definite cut above the usual literary thriller in its skillfully woven details, "Sepulchre" is well worth reading. If Ms. Mosse had only made the modern characters as interesting as those in the past, she'd have a stunner of a book, indeed.
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