by Lloyd Shepherd (2013)
LONDON 1812: For forty years Britain has dreamed of the Pacific island of Tahiti, a dark paradise of bloody cults and beautiful natives. Now, decades after the first voyage of Captain Cook, a new ship returns to London, crammed with botanical specimens and, it seems, the mysteries of Tahiti. When, days after the Solander's arrival, some of its crew are found dead and their sea-chests ransacked - their throats slashed, faces frozen into terrible smiles - John Harriott, magistrate of the Thames river police, puts constable Charles Horton in charge of the investigation. But what connects the crewmen's dying dreams with the ambitions of the ship's principal backer, Sir Joseph Banks of the Royal Society?
Rachel Johnson
Munich, 1936. She doesn't know it, but 18-year-old Daphne Linden has a seat in the front row of history. Along with her best friend, Betsy Barton-Hill, and a whole bevy of other young English upper-class girls, Daphne is in Bavaria to improve her German, to go to the Opera, to be 'finished'.
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.
Marie Macpherson
Hailes Castle, 1511. Midnight on a doom-laden Hallowe'en and Elisabeth Hepburn, feisty daughter of the Earl of Bothwell, makes a wish?to wed her lover, the poet David Lindsay. But her uncle has other plans. To safeguard the interests of the Hepburn family she is to become a nun and succeed her aunt as Prioress of St. Mary?s Abbey, Haddington. However, plunged into the political maelstrom and religious turmoil of the early Scottish Reformation, her life there is hardly one of quiet contemplation. Strong-willed and independent, she clashes with those who question her unorthodox regime at St. Mary?s, including Cardinal David Beaton and her rival, Sister Maryoth Hay. But her greatest struggle is against her thrawn godson, John Knox. Witnessing his rejection of the Roman Catholic Church?aided by David Lindsay?she despairs that the sins of her past may have contributed to his present disenchantment. As he purges himself from the puddle of papistry, Knox finds his voice, denouncing everything he once held dear, but will that include his godmother, Prioress Elisabeth? And by confessing her dark secrets, will Elisabeth steer Knox from the pernicious pull of Protestantism or drive him further down the fateful path he seems hell-bent on, a path that leads to burning at the stake? In a daring attempt to shed light on a wheen of unanswered questions about John Knox?s early, undocumented life, this novel throws up some startling claims and controversial conjectures. The First Blast of the Trumpet is book one of The Knox Trilogy.
Lisa Colletta
"Social satire in the modern period is traditionally seen as a conservative genre in opposition to the experimental aesthetic of literary modernism. In Dark Humor and Social Satire in the Modern British Novel, Lisa Colletta challenges this prevailing view, arguing that the darkly humorous social satires of the interwar years in Britain display a deep ambivalence and a delight in disorder that denies the reader the comfort of a stable or totalizing critique. Combining analysis of canonical writers and those often overlooked - Virginia Woolf, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Evelyn Waugh, and Anthony Powell - Colletta draws on psychoanalytic theories of joke-work and gallows humor to make the claim that dark humor is a defining characteristic of Modernism. She deftly connects these writers through their humor and offers an innovative rereading of Modernist texts."--Jacket.