From Amazon.com
If you've read any of Robert Goddard's topnotch psychological thrillers (including
Beyond Recall,
Out of the Sun, and
Hand in Glove), you know that he specializes in setting up an impossible situation and then showing how it is in fact diabolically possible.
Caught in the Light is no exception.
When photographer Ian Jarrett, on assignment in snowy Vienna, meets and falls in love with a mysterious woman named Marian Esguard, the sex is terrific and their future back in England looks happy. Jarrett walks out on his wife and 15-year-old daughter and goes off to await his new lover. But she doesn't show up, and Jarrett decides to track her down. In the process he unearths an out-of-this-world mystery: Marian may well be a ghost from the past (and a ghost with a grudge). That would certainly explain why none of the pictures of Marian come out. During the 19th century, a woman of the same name claimed to have discovered the techniques of modern photography, but she never received the credit for it.
Quickly--perhaps a little too quickly--other people appear on the scene to explain the unexplainable. There's the London psychotherapist who has been treating Eris Moberly (the woman who calls herself Marian Esguard); there's a slick financier with a shadowy background and unknown motives. But despite these secondary characters popping out of the woodwork, Goddard is a master craftsman: he lures us into his fun house expertly, then guides us through the dark tunnels, cackling madly. An added bonus is a reverence for the history of photography, which lights up the story. --Dick Adler
From Publishers Weekly
British writer Goddard has achieved a steady readership here with his atmospheric novels (Into the Blue; Beyond Recall) in which characters unravel a mystery in their pasts. Photography illuminates his new narrative as it spirals from a simple tale of a lonely man searching for his lover to a complex study of obsessions spanning two centuries. While on assignment in Vienna, photographer Ian Jarrett becomes enamored with a woman who calls herself Marian Esguard. He returns to England to inform his wife and daughter that he is leaving them, but his next rendezvous with his paramour never occurs; she disappears, and it turns out that his photographs have been exposed and ruined. His personal and professional life destroyed, Ian pursues his lover, learning that she is a fraud who has claimed the identity of a 19th-century gentlewoman with a talent for chemistry who may have discovered photography decades before the accredited Fox Talbot. Propelled by a psychiatrist with secrets of her own, Ian unmasks murder, deception, blackmail and theft over many decades, while reconsidering his own life as well. With more twists and bumps than an English country road, the convoluted plot swerves from modern mystery to Regency romance to psychological thriller, with Ian experiencing danger and tragedy and bitter regret. What gives cohesion to the story is the lovingly detailed account of the art and science of photography. Goddard takes us to the other side of the lens, showing how composition, light and story can unite to make a great photograph, then traces the history of the process with stops along the way at the 1851 World's Fair, a corporate magnate's London headquarters and Sotheby's. Whether the mystery woman is a heroine reincarnated or evil incarnate proves less compelling than how the magic of photography triumphs over time.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
