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Yes Charlie, I hope all is well very soon.
I too enjoyed the book, being something of an Ancient History tragic. Linked to that I find archaeology fascinating, and I love puzzles and the ways people go about solving them. So this was definitely ticking all those boxes for me.
For me, the central section on Kober dragged because I thought that Fox was too exhaustive in her detailed study of what Kober was doing. Yes, the work she did was absolutely amazing in terms of her punch card system and the detailed analysis she did. It was all done with pencil and paper at the kitchen table after a demanding day of teaching, marking papers and what have you, and was indeed extraordinary.
However, as Bookworm_Girl said, something like that needs a team of people who bring different skills to the problem. Sadly there was precious little collaboration for much of the time. Arthur Evans refused to make more of the tablets available; Kober rebuffed Ventris very rudely when he suggested collaboration, though others did join him.
Despite Fox's claim that Kober may have solved the riddle, it seems to me that she was not a person able to make the intuitive leap that Ventris did. She was a person obsessed with detail. It needs both sorts to deal with a puzzle like this.
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