The Vanished Child - Softcover

Smith, Sarah

3.52

372 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0345418050 ISBN 13: 9780345418050

Publisher: Ballantine Books, 1997

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New England, 1887. A millionaire is brutally murdered. The only witness, his young grandchild, mysteriously disappears . . . Eighteen years later, in Switzerland, a man with no memory is "recognized" as Richard Knight, the missing child. Thus begins a masterpiece of historical suspense, as one man's obsession leads him toward a shattering truth--and to a killer, still at large. . . .

"Stunning . . . Tells a grim tale of murder and duplicity in stately prose that subtly enhances the psychological horrors."
--The New York Times Book Review

"Has all the ingredients of a juicy novel: greed, suspicion, love, madness and amnesia. Sarah Smith pulls it all together with a rare talent for telling a complex story in beautifully simple language."
--San Francisco Chronicle

"[A] deliciously intriguing tale. . . An artful literary puzzler featuring the kind of thick period detail and narrative intricacy mastered by Charles Dickens. . . This one belongs on the permanent shelf."
--The Philadelphia Inquirer

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From the Publisher:

Set in turn-of-the century Boston society, a compelling, gothic tale of a two men attempting to solve a 20-year-old murder. This is a New York Times notable book - and rightly so. Enigmatic and entertaining. The sequel, THE KNOWLEDGE OF WATER, is set in Paris and centers around strange doings in the art world; this book is also a New York Times Notable book.

Teri Henry,
Director Subsidiary Rights

From Kirkus Reviews:

Twenty years after someone killed William Knight and kidnapped William's eight-year-old grandson Richard, Baron Alexander von Reisden reluctantly agrees to impersonate Richard in order to solve the mystery of what happened back in 1887. Reisden, still mourning the death of his wife in a car he was driving, is lured away from his biological research when he's taken for Richard by Knight family physician Charles Adair, concerned because Richard's uncle Gilbert, neurotically unwilling to declare Richard dead, is thereby preventing the family fortune from passing through him to his callow adopted son Harry, who's engaged to promising blind pianist Perdita Halley. But Reisden doesn't agree to pass himself off as Richard in order to jolt Gilbert into action; he merely enters Gilbert's household insisting he's not Richard and lets him think whatever he likes. As Reisden puzzles over the old mystery- -was William really shot by his illegitimate son Jay French, as Charlie Adair testified, or was Charlie too far away to see who pulled the trigger?--and finds himself falling in love with Perdita, new mysteries multiply: Is the skeleton found in the barn evidence of Richard's murder, or of Jay's? Did Charlie really kill Jay himself? Is Reisden actually Richard after all? The news that William regularly beat his grandson paves the way for a solution to some of these riddles, but others are still floating unresolved at the final John Fowles-ish curtain. Smith (the computer-readable King of Space, plus academic nonfiction) paints a canvas reminiscent of Robert Goddard's well- upholstered period thrillers, though more tonily inconclusive at every stage. -- Copyright �1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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