At a wedding party in Cornwall, Chris Napier, the bride's uncle, is accosted by a drunken, disheveled, and evidently distraught intruder. The man turns out to be Chris's childhood friend Nicky Lanyon, whose father was hanged for the murder of Joshua Carnoweth-Chris's great-uncle and the man behind the Napier family's inherited state of affluence. Pleading his father's innocence, Nicky commits suicide, forcing Chris to test the truth of his friend's conviction. The conduct of more than one member of his own family begins to dog his hesitant footsteps into a past slowly darkening with the shadows of corruption, greed, lies, child abuse, and good old-fashioned revenge.
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Goddard's sense of place is strong. The Cornish market town of Truro, with its 19th-century cathedral looming over events spanning a century, provides the backdrop for the mystery and also for the shifting fortunes of the British experience. Descriptions of a grand family home transformed into a hotel and conference center, the tiny chain-pulled ferry crossing an estuary as it has done for generations, and Cornwall's unchanging and temperate beauty offer convincing detail beyond the usual place-name dropping.
Although the denouement is muddled by a confusion of identities and too many people thought dead resurfacing (both to Napier's dismay and delight), the general scheme is entertaining enough and just within the bounds of what's believable, given Goddard's manipulation of the reader's expectations. The central themes of revenge and greed lose some of their power when mixed with a subplot colored by a '90s obsession with sexual misdeeds, but these flaws do not detract from the pleasure of the whole. An enjoyable read, fraught with the tension Goddard's readers have come to expect.
"Satisfyingly complex...finishes in a rollercoaster of twists"
-Michael Hartland, Daily Telegraph
"Absorbing and intriguing"
-T.J. Binyon, Evening Standard
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Book Description paperback. Condition: New. 6th. Seller Inventory # 230712084