Singapore Sapphire
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- £4.99
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- £4.99
Publisher Description
Early twentieth-century Singapore is a place where a person can disappear, and Harriet Gordon hopes to make a new life for herself there, leaving her tragic memories behind her--but murder gets in the way.
Singapore, 1910--Desperate for a fresh start, Harriet Gordon finds herself living with her brother, a reverend and headmaster of a school for boys, in Singapore at the height of colonial rule. Hoping to gain some financial independence, she advertises her services as a personal secretary. It is unfortunate that she should discover her first client, Sir Oswald Newbold--explorer, mine magnate and president of the exclusive Explorers and Geographers Club--dead with a knife in his throat.
When Inspector Robert Curran is put on the case, he realizes that he has an unusual witness in Harriet. Harriet's keen eye for detail and strong sense of duty interests him, as does her distrust of the police and her traumatic past, which she is at pains to keep secret from the gossips of Singapore society.
When another body is dragged from the canal, Harriet feels compelled to help with the case. She and Curran are soon drawn into a murderous web of treachery and deceit and find themselves face-to-face with a ruthless cabal that has no qualms about killing again to protect its secrets.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In 1910, Harriet Gordon, the heroine of Stuart's underwhelming debut and series launch, comes to the British colony of Singapore after suffering severe emotional and physical traumas: the death of her husband, and being force-fed in prison after her arrest at a London suffragette rally. Gordon, who works as an unpaid assistant at a Singapore boys' school, tries to earn some income as a typist. One day, when she attempts to retrieve her typewriter from the home of a client, Sir Oswald Newbold, she finds him dead with a dagger sticking out of his neck. Later, Hans Visscher, a hotel clerk who was at the Newbold house the night before her grim discovery, tells her that he warned Sir Oswald about something and that he's now at risk from a group he identifies as the VOC. The initials match those used for the defunct Dutch East India Company. Inevitably, Gordon takes an active role in helping the hunky lead policeman on the case and puts herself in danger. A pat ending doesn't help. Hopefully, the sequel will contain deeper characterizations and a less formulaic plot.
