A review by wolfthorn
Rembrandt's Ghost by Paul Christopher

2.0

The title is very misleading, Rembrandt's ghost is not relevant at all, and it's just to hook you into reading it. Do not fall for it!! The plot is completely ridiculous, it starts off with a mysterious painting, but then sidetracks into looking for treasure and a missing person, before ending up on a uncharted island inhabited by the offspring of some Japanese military who still think there's a war going on. Despite all of this the book is really quite dull and a slog to get through. There's a lot of extraneous detail which would have been much better removed. I'm not interested in what sort of engine the boats have, or even reading two pages of the history of one particular vessel. Finn is very annoying, Billy is bland, and there's too many other characters. Some characters are described as 'the man with the gun' or 'the man with the scar' which is confusing. There's an early chapter devoted to some gangster type who seemed to be important for the storyline but who was never mentioned again. So many things are mentioned once or twice and then dropped, it's really hard to keep up with. The constant slagging off of London and the British in general at the start is really off-putting too.