Another Review at MyShelf.Com

Publisher: Harper Torch (Harper Collins)
Release Date: January 2004
ISBN: 0061032107
Awards:  
Format Reviewed: Paperback
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Genre: Historical Crime [1817 London & Scotland]
Reviewed: 2004
Reviewer: Rachel A Hyde
Reviewer Notes:  
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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.