Shadows & Lies
A Mystery
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- USD 12.99
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- USD 12.99
Descripción editorial
Following the huge success of The Shape of Sand, shortlisted for the CWA Historical Dagger award, comes this dramatic story of love, war, and intrigue.
It is the year 1910 and the bloodstained body of an unknown woman is found on the grounds of Sir Henry Chetwynd's Shropshire estate. A reluctant heir to the estate, Sebastian Chetwynd is already battling with divided loyalties: his ambition for a career of his own and his father's expectation that he follow in his footsteps, and his duty to marry for money when he is in love with Louisa, a student doctor and supporter of women's rights.
Unknown to the Chetwynds, there is Hannah, living in London, who has lost her memory of everything that happened in the dozen years previous to a serious accident. In an attempt to unravel her past, Hannah writes down the story of her life as far as she can remember it. As she reaches out to grasp and piece together the fragments of those missing years, it seems that the ongoing murder investigation in Shropshire could hold the key.
Switching between troubled South Africa in the last years of the nineteenth century and the murder in England ten years later, Marjorie Eccles's delicate narrative reveals the lies and deceptions that have lain beneath the veneer of polite Edwardian society.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Best known for her procedural series featuring English village police detective Gil Mayo (A Sunset Touch, etc.), Eccles delivers a satisfyingly complex stand-alone, spanning the years from 1894 to 1909. This acute psychological study slowly untangles the web binding the fortunes of an Armenian patriot, an amnesiac accident victim and various members of the aristocratic Chetwynd family and the wool-selling Armitages of Yorkshire. Dexterously shifting from London to Shropshire to the British South African outpost of Mafeking, Eccles explores women's fight for suffrage and traditionally male careers, the breakdown of distinctions between the old nobility and the rich merchant class, and political upheavals in South Africa. Eccles's narrative skills and the myriad contextual details make it easy to forget the mysterious murder victim found on a Shropshire estate until pulled back by the episodic efforts of the police to solve the crime.