A Little Death
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- £3.99
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- £3.99
Publisher Description
Shortlisted for the Anthony Award for Best Paperback Original and the CWA Ellis Peters Award for Historical Crime Fiction.
London, 1955. Three bodies are found in a house - but when the police search for the murder weapon, vital evidence is destroyed. One of the victims is former society beauty Georgina Gresham, prime suspect in the notorious murder of her husband, James, almost thirty years earlier. Beside her lie the bodies of her brother Edmund and housekeeper Ada.
But there is a link with the past. In the 1890s, in a beautiful garden, three children played together. Their lives were secure, their future certain - until the youngest child was found with fatal head injuries...
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A former teacher and writer of children's history books, Wilson delivers a superb debut novel that's more literary fiction than genre mystery. With delicious stealth, Wilson reveals a chilling, amoral and degenerative murderer, whose true nature only becomes apparent to the reader in small, subtle increments. Told in three alternating first-person narratives (by willful Georgina, her wishy-washy brother, Edmund, and their lifelong servant, Ada), the story maintains razor-sharp suspense to the last page. Set in Victorian England, the prominent and respected Lomax family becomes overwhelmed by tragedy when Mrs. Lomax dies in childbirth and her four-year-old son, Freddie, is murdered. A feeble-minded servant is blamed for Freddie's death, and the Lomax paterfamilias withdraws into isolation and eccentricity. Tracing the course of the Lomax family, Wilson presents a tour de force reminiscent of Barbara Vine.
