Perfectly Pure and Good
A Sarah Fortune Mystery
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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- $2.99
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- $2.99
Publisher Description
Family fights, suicides, sirens, death, and even a ghost. Everything happens here …
Attorney Sarah Fortune is dispatched to a small coastal town to straighten out the financial affairs of the eccentric Pardoe family. The three siblings and their mother, who is suffering from dementia, own most of Merton on Sea. The business of the estate should be simple enough, and Sarah sees the job as an opportunity for a mini-vacation—a chance to get out of the city.
But she soon discovers that the family, and the town itself, are afflicted by a past filled with guilt, pain, and unrequited love. Most haunting of all, though, is the legacy of a suicide that took place two years ago, when a beautiful woman with an uncanny resemblance to Sarah walked into the sea and never came back …
Fans of Ruth Rendell and Julia Spencer-Fleming will love this atmospheric psychological thriller.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
With this nimble meld of ghost story, moral fable and psychological drama, Fyfield ( Shadow Play ; Question of Guilt ) joins the ranks of those writers--Peter Dickinson and Michael Dibdin among them--who reinvent the genre with social commentary and impressionistic narrative brushstrokes. Red-haired Sarah Fortune, a young and effortlessly attractive widowed lawyer, goes to East Anglia to sort out the muddled legal affairs of the family of recently deceased Henry Pardoe. In the same seaside town two years earlier, red-haired Elisabeth Tysall committed suicide by drowning. A year later her husband Charles--who had also been violently obsessed with Sarah--did the same, walking into the sea. While villagers report sightings of both Tysall ghosts, Sarah gradually discerns the twists within the troubled Pardoe family. She deals with a pouting, brutal younger son, a bitter older son (a doctor and once the lover of Elisabeth Tysall) and a teenaged daughter in love with a local boy; the widow Pardoe appears to be over-the-top loony. Honing in on their secrets, Sarah gradually reveals secrets of her own. This is a complex, unsettling novel.
