A Christmas Homecoming
A Novel
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4.2 • 16 Ratings
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
Among the brilliant array of Anne Perry’s New York Times bestselling novels, her Christmas stories occupy perhaps the warmest spot in the hearts of readers. Each one is a masterpiece of suspense; each is alight with the true holiday spirit.
In A Christmas Homecoming, a familiar face from the Charlotte and Thomas Pitt novels—Charlotte’s mother, Caroline—travels with her young husband, Joshua Fielding, and his theatrical troupe to Whitby, the Yorkshire fishing village where Dracula the vampire first touched English soil in the sensational novel named after him. Joshua has arranged to produce a stage adaptation of Dracula by the daughter of Whitby millionaire Charles Netheridge during the Christmas holiday, but after the disastrous first read-through of her amateurish script, only the fact that the company is depending on Netheridge’s financial backing for their spring tour keeps them at work.
As tempers flare and wind and snow swirl around Netheridge’s lonely hilltop mansion, a black-cloaked stranger emerges from the storm—an eerily opportune arrival, for this enigmatic figure, one Anton Ballin, turns out to be a theatrical genius. At the same time, a brooding evil makes itself felt. Instead of the theatrical triumph that Netheridge desired for his daughter, there is murder—shocking and terrifying.
Anne Perry’s ninth Christmas novel keeps us poised on a razor’s edge of suspense, hypnotized by a story in which the heartwarming power of goodness is challenged by the seductive power of inner darkness. In the end, A Christmas Homecoming lifts the spirit and rejoices the heart.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Perry's fine ninth Victorian Christmas mystery (after 2010's A Christmas Odyssey) takes Caroline Fielding, the mother-in-law of Insp. Thomas Pitt of Scotland Yard (the lead of Perry's main series), to the town of Whitby, in York, where Dracula came ashore in Stoker's recently published horror novel. Caroline and her actor husband, Joshua, are the guests of Charles Netheridge, whose daughter, Alice, has adapted Stoker's book for the stage. Joshua, who's brought the lead actors in his acting company to the Netheridges' huge mansion, hopes to parlay Alice's Dracula, to be performed for the locals at Christmas, into Charles's financial backing for the coming theatrical season. Then a mysterious stranger shows up at their snowbound door seeking refuge: Anton Ballin, who alarmingly resembles the vampire king himself. While Ballin makes some staging suggestions that improve the play, his arrival provides the catalyst for bloodshed. Caroline proves herself an astute sleuth in this challenging whodunit.
