Death at Greenway
A Novel
-
- £7.99
Publisher Description
"Irresistible... a Golden Age homage, an elegantly constructed mystery that on every page reinforces the message that everyone counts." –New York Times Book Review
AGATHA AWARD WINNER!
Recommended by New York Times Book Review • Wall Street Journal • Parade • Country Living • Chicago Tribune • South Florida Sun-Sentinel • The Free-Lance Star • St. Louis Post-Dispatch • CrimeReads • Nerd Daily • Red Carpet Crash • and many more!
From the award-winning author of The Day I Died and The Lucky One, a captivating suspense novel about nurses during World War II who come to Agatha Christie’s holiday estate to care for evacuated children, but when a body is discovered nearby, the idyllic setting becomes host to a deadly mystery.
Bridey Kelly has come to Greenway House—the beloved holiday home of Agatha Christie—in disgrace. A terrible mistake at St. Prisca’s Hospital in London has led to her dismissal as a nurse trainee, and her only chance for redemption is a position in the countryside caring for children evacuated to safety from the Blitz.
Greenway is a beautiful home full of riddles: wondrous curios not to be touched, restrictions on rooms not to be entered, and a generous library, filled with books about murder. The biggest mystery might be the other nurse, Gigi, who is like no one Bridey has ever met. Chasing ten young children through the winding paths of the estate grounds might have soothed Bridey’s anxieties and grief—if Greenway were not situated so near the English Channel and the rising aggressions of the war.
When a body washes ashore near the estate, Bridey is horrified to realize this is not a victim of war, but of a brutal killing. As the local villagers look among themselves, Bridey and Gigi discover they each harbor dangerous secrets about what has led them to Greenway. With a mystery writer’s home as their unsettling backdrop, the young women must unravel the truth before their safe haven becomes a place of death . . .
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In 1941, trainee nurse Bridget Kelly, the heroine of this richly nuanced mystery from Mary Higgins Clark Award winner Rader-Day (The Lucky One), is mourning the bombing deaths of her mother and siblings when she makes a medication dosing mistake that kills a man. Her supervisor assigns her to care for children being evacuated from London and promises that if she does well, her training can resume. With 10 infants and toddlers and a fellow nurse who says her name is also Bridget Kelly but goes by Gigi, Bridget travels to Greenway, the Devon holiday home of author Agatha Christie, which is empty except for staff while Christie and her husband do war work. Gigi is unreliable and faints at the sight of blood, but her effervescence helps lighten Bridget's sadness and self-doubt. When a strangled corpse is found in a nearby river, Bridget recognizes it as a man whom she discovered wandering in Greenway's garden one morning. Soon afterward, Gigi disappears. Through multiple viewpoints, Rader-Day nicely evokes the isolation and dislocations of people in WWII Britain while revealing her characters' complexities. Despite the many allusions to Christie's life and work, she eschews an artificially neat conclusion. Fans of both Christie and Rader-Day will relish this.
