I received this book for Christmas and I have to admit, it isn't something I would have picked up off the shelf in a book store. It isn't, by a long way, the best book I've read but there's something nice about its shameless melodrama.

Let me briefly explain the plot. Mariah Mundi, the title character, goes to a boarding school in London. The era is never revealed but it's set at some point in the 19th century, I think. Mariah is fifteen-year-old orphan and he's just reached the age where he has to go out into the world. A job is arranged for him by the school and he sets off with a 'first class' suit and an equally first class train ticket that was given to him on the platform by a panicked stranger, along with a pack of cards. After some odd encounters on the train, Mariah arrives in a seaside town on a dark and stormy night. He sets off to his future place of work, a hotel hanging halfway off the edge of a cliff. From there, all mayhem ensures.

I'll give you a quick summery of this mayhem, shall I? Well – in no chronological order – there is a crazy inventor, a fish and chip shop, an overly ambitious woman with scary finger nails, secrets hidden in paintings, a magician, giant crabs, pearls, a spirited young Irish girl, two up-to-no-good detectives, an extremely creepy doll and something lurking in the fog. Plus a box that can turn anything to gold.

Remarkably, the book does not feel rushed. Everything is crammed in – it takes place over about five days – but it doesn't feel that way. It's easy to read and mystery oozes out of it. There's even room for Mariah's private life to be – partly – resolved. All of the characters are memorable, which is good because to forget them would be disastrous – there are enough disguises being donned that to lose track of who someone is, would lead you to lose track of the entire story. Admittedly, towards the end it does get a little muddled but that's because everything's happening everywhere.

I only have two real qualms. The first – although this may be me not reading it properly – is that the two characters Mariah meets on the train (the odd encounters I mentioned earlier) seem to have completely different personalities at the end of the journey to the beginning. But having reached the sea, they're consistent for the rest of the book. The second is that I never really got a sense of the hotel. I was never quite sure where the characters were inside it – were they hundreds of metres below ground, or up in the tower where the bedrooms were? Also, considering the apparent vastness of it, there were an awful lot of coincidences. But details, details.

The Victorians would have adored this story, I think, considering their love of anything vaguely dramatic or mysterious. I enjoyed it too. You just don't want to think too much about the plot.

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