Carver's Truth
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- $8.99
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
London, 1871. Traveler, photographer and sometime intelligencer Adam Carver is asked by a friend from the Foreign Office to find Dolly Delaney, a West End dancing girl who has been involved with a diplomat and since disappeared. What seems a straightforward case soon proves otherwise. Carver is discomfited to come across alluring daguerreotypes of Dolly and he seeks answers from one of her fellow dancers, the feisty Hetty Gallant. Soon, Carver and his stoical manservant Quint are drawn north to York, where they are implicated in a shocking death. The pair flee across the Channel, but soon encounter new treacheries in Berlin, the imposing and dangerous capital of the nascent Germany.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Set in 1871, Rennison's middling second thriller featuring a Victorian version of Margery Allingham's Albert Campion and Magersfontein Lugg (after 2014's Carver's Quest) finds Adam Carver, an author who's also a "sometime traveller, intelligencer and occasional photographer," back in London after carrying out covert work for the Foreign Office in Turkey. Carver's handler and friend, Richard Sunman, asks him to trace a missing woman, actress and dancer Dolly Delaney, who is of interest to the Foreign Office for reasons Sunman doesn't share. Carver agrees, despite the lack of detail, and, aided by his manservant, Quintus Devlin, the brawn to his brains, begins to search for Delaney, a quest that takes him to York and eventually overseas. Carver's inquiries soon put him in harm's way, but the familiar central story line is less interesting than a subplot involving revelations about Carver's late father, a railway baron. The father apparently took his own life after his fraudulently acquired fortune vanished. The lack of memorable characters is a serious weakness.
