From Amazon.co.uk
Set in Glastonbury, Goddard's deliciously convoluted mystery
Dying to Tell introduces us to Lance Bradley, leading an uneventful, indolent life in Somerset until he receives a plea for help from the sister of an old friend. The friend, Rupert Alder, has terminated the allowances to his feckless siblings, and Bradley agrees to track Rupert down to find the reason for his actions. But in London, Bradley finds that Alder has disappeared, and his employers (a prestigious shipping company) believe him to be the perpetrator of a major fraud. An American by the name of Townley has, it seems, hired a private eye to find Rupert, only to be neutralised by powerful interests. And there's the Japanese businessman who claims Rupert has stolen an important document... As Bradley gets closer to the centre of an arcane mystery, he finds that the year 1963 (in which Bradley was born) holds the key to a series of bizarre puzzles.
This is the kind of finely-tuned mystery that Goddard dispatches with total assurance: elegantly crafted, with a quirkily characterised anti-hero in the mystified Lance Bradley. Other novelists noted for their storytelling abilities may have fallen from public favour, but Robert Goddard remains one of the soundest and most compelling novelists the UK has produced--perhaps because all his abilities have gone into producing narratives of total authority and persuasiveness, rather than the creation of any public persona. We don't know who Goddard is, and we don't care: his name on a book is an ironclad guarantee of something the reader will find very hard to put down. --Barry Forshaw
--This text refers to an alternate
Hardcover
edition.
Product Description
Intricate, intense and satisfying to the last page, another classic mystery from a best-selling author.
It is autumn in the little Somerset town of Glastonbury. Lance Bradley is just beginning to feel that her is idling away his life there as usual when he receives a call for help from the eccentric sister of his old friend Rupert Alder. Inexplicably, Rupe has stopped sending the money that his dysfunctional siblings depend on. Reluctantly, Lance goes to London to learn what he can, only to find that his friend has vanished. Rupe’s employers, the Eurybia Shipping Company, want him tried for fraud. A Japanese businessman called Hashimoto claims he has stolen a document of huge importance. And a private detective is demanding money for trying to trace on Rupe’s behalf an American called Townley who was involved in a mysterious death at Wilderness Farm, near Glastonbury, back in 1963, that year of so many momentous events which just happens also to be the year of Lance’s birth.
No sooner has Lance decided that whatever Rupe was up to is too risky for him to get involved in than he finds that he already is involved, and the only way out is to get in deeper still. Where is Rupe? What is the document he has stolen? Who is Townley? And what happened at Wilderness Farm in the summer of 1963 that holds the key to a secret more amazing than Lance Bradley could ever have imagined?
--This text refers to an alternate
Hardcover
edition.