SOURCE: “Sermons in Stones,” in Spectator, September 4, 1993, p. 27.

In the following review, Bray offers a positive assessment of Shear.

A novel about an adulterous English geologist doesn't sound much like a sizzler, but just try putting Tim Parks's Shear down. I would have read it at a sitting were it not for part of the North London Electricity Grid going haywire one evening. Middle-brow fiction doesn't come better than this. The book has many of the ingredients of the thriller: the woman on the vengeance trail, the seductively enigmatic foreigner, the fat and overbearing politician (wonderfully sketched in two lines of dialogue), above all the question-marked death that our hero is out to explain. But there is more to it than that. This is a novel of several strata. Peter Nicholson, the geologist in question, has travelled to an island in the Mediterranean on behalf of an Australian...