Dark Angel
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3.9 • 15 Ratings
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
A tale of passion, betrayal, and dark family secrets—from the English countryside of 1910 to 1980s New York—by the #1 New York Times–bestselling author.
On an April night in 1910, just after the appearance of Halley's comet, a man dies violently at an English manor called Winterscombe. More than half a century later, Victoria Cavendish tries to root out the secrets that have haunted three generations of her family. With the aid of a timeworn journal, she begins an unconventional voyage into the secrets of the past. As Victoria moves closer to the truth of what happened on that fateful night long ago, she uncovers a shocking saga of sex, love, and betrayal.
Traveling through two world wars and beyond, peopled by a cast of unforgettable characters, Dark Angel is a mesmerizing novel about love and redemption.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Beauman's eagerly awaited second novel, not so fiery and beguiling as her bestselling Destiny , seeks to deal thoughtfully with the entwined issues of social class and the kind of exploitative, even perverse sexuality that can invade and destroy a family. What weakens this ambitious, potentially gripping scheme is the author's tendency to write of decadence in repetitive and fatiguing prose. Spanning the period from 1910 to the '80s, the narrative moves between Winterscombe, the English country manor where the fashionable gather for shooting and ``leisured adultery,'' and the New York City/Hamptons scene of aging eccentric gays, aesthetes and interior decorators. In 1968 Victoria Cavendish, 38, learns from a Hindu seer that she must choose between two women--her long-dead mother, Jane, a WW I nurse in France, and Constance, her seductively dangerous godmother, who wormed her way into the family and used her marriage to powerful financier Montague Stern to undermine it. Both women had vied for the love of Victoria's father, Acland. Both were at Winterscombe when Constance's promiscuous father, Shawcross, died horribly mangled in a mantrap--an illegal device to stop poachers. In search of her family's past, Victoria reads tattered old journals that yield dark secrets--incest, fornication, betrayal, suicide, possibly murder--meanwhile coming to grips with ``deadly'' Constance. Although she herself is curiously passive and listless, Victoria's own love story gathers gradual momentum, despite Constance's opposition, when she rediscovers her childhood sweetheart. 200,000 first printing; $200,000 ad/promo; Literary Guild main selection.
