Company of Liars

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Pamela Hartshorne

Jane believes in keeping her promises, but a deathbed vow sets her on a twisting path of deceit and joy that takes her from the dark secrets of Holmwood House in York to the sign of the golden lily in London's Mincing Lane. Getting what you want, Jane discovers, comes at a price. For the child that she longed for, the child she promised to love and to keep safe, turns out to be a darker spirit than she could ever have imagined. Over four centuries later, Roz Acclam remembers nothing of the fire that killed her family - or of the brother who set it. Trying on a beautiful Elizabethan necklace found in the newly restored Holmwood House triggers disturbing memories of the past at last - but the past Roz remembers is not her own.

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Robin Blake

"Blake continues the series Booklist calls "a solid winner" with a darkly rich mystery centered on an apparent suicide that leads Cragg and Fidelis down a treacherous path.The year is 1742, and the people of Preston are looking forward to their ancient once-every-twenty-years festival of merriment and excess, the Preston Guild. But the prospect darkens as the town plunges into a financial crisis caused by the death of pawnbroker and would-be banker Philip Pimbo, shot behind the locked door of his office. Is it suicide? Coroner Titus Cragg suspects so, but Dr Luke Fidelis disagrees. To untangle the truth Cragg must dig out the secrets of Pimbo's personal life, learn the grim facts of the African slave trade, search for a missing Civil War treasure and deal with the machinations of his old enemy Ephraim Grimshaw, now the town's mayor. Cragg relies once again on the help and advice of his analytical friend Fidelis, his astute wife Elizabeth and the contents of a well-stocked library.As in his previous Cragg and Fidelis stories, Robin Blake brings a vivid cast of characters to the page in this third historical mystery about the dramas that breeds below the surface of life in a provincial Georgian town."--

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Suzanne Keen

"Romances of the Archive in Contemporary British Fiction is a discussion of the debates about the uses of the past contained in British fiction since the Falklands crisis. Suzanne Keen provides a detailed examination of the range of contemporary 'romances of the archive,' a genre in which British novelists both deal with the loss of Empire and a nostalgia for the past, and react to the postimperial condition of Great Britain. Keen identifies the genre and explains its literary sources from Edmund Spenser to H. P. Lovecraft and John LeCarre. She also accounts for the rise in popularity of the archival romance and provides a context for understanding the British postimperial preoccupation with history and heritage."--BOOK JACKET.

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Patricia Veryan

(The Tales of the Jeweled Men #4) A most unlikely hero, young Jack is known to all as a cowardly idiot, a mere shadow of a man with a shady past. But when the woman he loves is threatened by the sinister League of the Jewelled Men, Jack reveals the man behind the shadow.