I love Maggie O'Farrell's work and especially her use of anti-chronology or achronology. Her prose is always lucid and often lyrical and Lucrezia (and Alfonso and Emilia and Sofia especially) in The Marriage Portrait were entirely alive. O'Farrell conjures an atmosphere of threat and fear brilliantly, towards the end particularly, and I believed absolutely in Lucrezia and her talents and her frustrations and her extraordinary hair and her terrifying entrapment. There was only one thing that worried me - don't read on if you don't want a clue to the ending - : how did the rags remain in the lock long enough, without anyone else noticing them and removing them, after Jacopo put them there ? (Perhaps I missed a piece of achronology ... but I felt there was a gap of a few days ... .)