The Day of the Lie
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- £3.99
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- £3.99
Publisher Description
They came for me in November nineteen fifty-one and took me to Mokotow prison.
Cambridge, the present day. And out of the past, a cry for help: Father Anselm, the brilliant Benedictine, receives a visit from an old friend with a dangerous story to tell - the story of a woman betrayed by time, fate, and someone close to her . . . someone still unknown.
As a young woman, Roza Mojeska was part of an underground resistance group in Communist Poland. But after her arrest, an agent of the secret police makes her a devil's bargain - and in the dark of a government prison, a terrible choice is made.
Now, fifty years later, Anselm is called upon to investigate both Roza's story and a mystery dating back to the early 1980s, in the icy grip of the Cold War. And as he peels back years of history, decades of secrets, a half-century of lies, he exposes a truth that victim and torturer would keep hidden...
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalist John Fielding asks his friend Fr. Anselm Duffy, an English monk and former lawyer, to help a former Polish freedom fighter, in Brodrick's labyrinthine fourth Father Anselm thriller (after 2008's A Whispered Name). R za Mojewska was John's source for a story on the resistance in 1982, but they were betrayed to the secret police, costing John his press credentials and landing R za in prison. R za wants to find the informant and finally expose the operative who killed her husband in 1951 and forced her to keep a devastating secret. With his prior's permission, Anselm heads to Warsaw to uncover the truth behind the decades-old betrayal. The ensuing story is dense, complex, full of misdirection, and populated by characters who are either eager to forget or driven by remorse for what they did to survive. The history is fascinating, but the plot is hard to follow and the characters are difficult to keep straight. The book is less a thriller than a philosophical treatise on the search for balance between justice and mercy.