THE NUMBER ONE BESTSELLER AND AWARD-WINNING RICHARD & JUDY BOOK CLUB PICK

Murder, lies and betrayal in Regency England

England 1819. Thomas Shield, a master at a school just outside London, is tutor to a young American boy and the child’s sensitive best friend, Charles Frant. Helplessly drawn to Frant’s beautiful, unhappy mother, Shield becomes entwined in their family’s affairs.

When a brutal murder takes place in London’s seedy backstreets, all clues lead to the Frant family, and Shield is tangled in a web of lies, money, sex and death that threatens to tear his new life apart.

Soon, it emerges that at the heart of these macabre events lies the strange American boy. What secrets is the young Edgar Allan Poe hiding?

ANDREW TAYLOR

Andrew Taylor has been a full-time writer since 1981, and has written over twenty books. He has been described by The Times as ’One of Britain’s best writers of psychological suspense.’

Having decided to become a writer at the age of ten, he claims that it was his newly recognised facility for writing stories, teamed with the idea that a writer’s life consisted of not wearing a tie to work, that first attracted him to the career. It was the discovery of Sherlock Holmes at the tender of age of eight and earlier yet with Enid Blyton’s Hurrah for Little Noddy, that his love for crime novels was incited. ’Another thing I like about crime fiction’ he asserts, ’is its lack of pretension. It sets out to entertain – it’s fiction with its sleeves rolled up.’

Edad: adultos jóvenes