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Publisher:
Harper Torch (Harper Collins) |
Release
Date: January 2004 |
ISBN:
0061032107 |
Awards:
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Format
Reviewed: Paperback |
Buy
it at Amazon US
|| UK |
Read
an Excerpt |
Genre:
Historical Crime [1817 London & Scotland] |
Reviewed:
2004 |
Reviewer:
Rachel A Hyde |
Reviewer
Notes: |
Copyright
MyShelf.com |
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Beneath
A Silent Moon
By Tracy Grant
If you have read
Daughter of the Game (also reviewed on this site) and wonder
what happens to Charles and Melanie Fraser next, you won’t
find out here. Instead, we get to find out what they were getting
up to two years earlier. Charles, the eldest son of a wealthy and
nobly-connected family has just returned from the Continent, after
spending the war years involved in espionage. Fighting and spying
alongside him was his wife, beautiful Melanie, who is now finding
that London Society does not know quite where to place her. When
Charles’ distant father drops the bombshell that he is about
to marry Charles’ first love Honoria, everybody is amazed;
she is less than half his age and his first marriage ended in his
wife’s suicide. The family is all invited up to the Fraser
estate in Scotland to celebrate, but as every crime reader knows,
a house party is a tempting invitation to murder.
As with the other novel, this is a
Regency with a difference: murders, sexual intrigue, old crimes
and tales of wartime espionage. This all sounds like Anne Perry
mixed with Bernard Cornwell, but neither of these writers would
produce a novel of such awesome length. The sheer volume tends to
dilute what ought to be an exciting story, and the many shocking
revelations become repetitive after a while. Charles and Melanie’s
war years remain tantalizingly out of reach, and I wonder if the
author is planning on writing another book set farther in the past.
This would make an interesting (and hopefully shorter) tale, perhaps
more akin to the excellent Daughter of the Game, which
rattled along where this one ambles.
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