Summer of Secrets
-
- $9.99
-
- $9.99
Publisher Description
When a murder is staged at magnificent Knebworth House, Victorian writer-sleuths, Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins investigate.
August, 1856. Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens are spending the summer at Knebworth House, the magnificent Hertfordshire home of fellow writer Lord Edward Bulwer-Lytton, where they are putting on a charity performance of one of Lord Edward's most successful plays, The Lady of Lyon. But the dress rehearsal is disrupted by the discovery of a body lying in the centre of the stage, shot to death.
With everyone involved in the play coming under suspicion, the two writer-sleuths feel compelled to investigate. Their enquiries unearth a number of scandalous secrets lurking among the writers, artists and actors assembled at Knebworth. Secrets that stretch back more than twenty years. Secrets that will have devastating repercussions for the present.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Harrison's middling third whodunit featuring Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins (after 2020's Winter of Despair) takes the two Victorian authors to Knebworth House, the Hertfordshire castle that's home to Lord Edward Bulwer-Lytton, an MP and fellow writer. Along with a magazine editor, a journalist, and several artists, Bulwer-Lytton has invited the two close friends to perform one of his own plays at a charitable benefit for the family of a recently deceased actor. The atmosphere at Knebworth is fraught, in large part because Bulwer-Lytton's mentally unstable wife, whom he once had confined to an asylum, is in attendance. And Collins is disgusted by his host's secretary, the unctuous Tom Maguire, who later harasses a young woman with whom Dickens's son Charley is enamored. The tensions come to a head when one of the cast members is fatally shot during the play's performance. Neither Dickens nor Collins is effectively brought to life, and their sleuthing is unremarkable. The final reveal doesn't redeem a lackluster plot. This installment falls far short of Harrison's best work, which is very good indeed.
