A Lesson in Dying

This wasn’t great - I gained very little real idea of the character of the lead (or indeed anyone else other than through behavioural caricatures). In some respects the lead seems quite passive and the story happens around him. There’s a dead headmaster, a village of secrets and a sequence of events and actions by other characters that lead our hero to the final correct conclusion but the characterisations that we see in Vera and Perez are just not there. Still, this was an early attempt and clearly necessary practice for the later big hits!