The White Swan by Paul Morrison – a review

Johnny is a psychic entertainer who returns to his home town of York for a show at the Opera House. He works with his Cousin Frankie. Her job is to go through the guest list for his show. She then goes to visit the guests under assumed guises in order to find background information that Johnny can use to pretend to have psychic ability.

When he arrives in York he is asked to visit a family whose sister was murdered the year before and the case still hasn’t been solved. Johnny is asked if he can help use his powers to find the killer. Whilst obviously he has no psychic powers he does become intrigued and looks into the family further.

I was asked to review this by Paul and was looking forward to it as a York girl myself. I enjoyed this novel although I did feel some of it could have done with better editing. The plot itself was quite good and did keep me reading, however I felt the ending was a bit disappointing and the motive was very thin.

Bits of the writing were also in need of a scrawl of red pen I thought. Whilst I was pleased it was set in York, and some of the descriptions really did give a good feel of the city, the word York was used too many times. It made alot of conversations seem quite unnatural, for example two people talking would say ‘we leave on…’ not ‘we leave York on…’ I almost felt that the book had actually been sponsored by Visit York (which is not a bad thing, York is a fantastic place)

Some of the characters were a bit one dimensional and none of them really stood out as deserving of sympathy. Unfortunately this meant that equally the victims within the book did not really make me care about them.

However overall I like the concept of a York Mentalist and the story itself was quite good. This was a debut novel and so I would read the next instalment, where hopefully my minor criticisms over the editing will be ironed out.