From Publishers Weekly
This atmospheric suspense thriller by the author of the Poldark series and Marnie roams from India to England. James Locke, a disabled WW II hero and gardener extraordinaire, refuses to accept an inquest's ruling that his daughter Stephanie's death was "by misadventure." A "cheerful rebel" of 21, Stephanie had taken up with 38-year-old, twice-married Errol Colton, a photographer involved with international "tourist development." On a business trip to sweltering, sultry Goa, India, Stephanie discovers that Errol's briefcase holds a suspicious wad of money along with receipts for flax (code jargon for heroin). At the same time, young law clerk Narish Prasad is forced by a loan shark who backed his gambling debuts to ingest 80 condom-clad packets of heroin to smuggle into England. Their stories collide when Locke pursues the trail of an "accumulation of untoward circumstances," including a grammatically incorrect suicide note and a long-ago murder in Edinburgh. Intriguing characters range from a philanthropist who is about to receive Oxford University's highest honor to nefarious underworld thugs who are involved in a drug ring that stretches from India to Corfu to England. Graham's page-turner combines characters with rich dimensions and spiraling plot twists, and the penultimate scene in Cardiff, Wales's Llandaff Cathedral is mortifyingly trenchant.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Stephanie Locke is a 21-year-old student at Oxford who has an affair with 38-year-old Errol Colton, a married man. Shortly after she and Errol return from a trip to Goa, Stephanie is found dead in bed, an apparent suicide. At the inquest, Errol testifies that Stephanie became despondent when he decided to stop seeing her, but Stephanie's father knows that something happened during the couple's holiday that so distressed his daughter that she decided to end the affair although she was still very much in love. James Locke's refusal to believe his daughter committed suicide, and his determination to investigate her death, make some people very nervous. The reader travels from Goa and India to Oxford and London in this well-written, suspenseful novel by the author of A Green Flash ( LJ 9/1/87). Strongly recommended.
- Elizabeth Mellett, Brookline P.L., Mass.Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
