โ Scribed by Robert Goddard
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
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
'Gripping...woven together with more twists than a country lane'
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