PERFECTLY PURE AND GOOD: A Novel - Hardcover

Fyfield, Frances

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679426655 ISBN 13: 9780679426653

Publisher: Pantheon, 1994

Synopsis

Sarah Fortune's name belies her recent life. A beautiful red-haired attorney, she's still recovering from the macabre attack of a now-deceased client, Charles Tysall, who became obsessed with her. The scars on her creamy skin have healed but will never disappear. Now the senior partner in her firm has asked her to travel to the seaside town of Merton to sort out a legacy left to the feuding Pardoe family. It is the same town where Tysall spent her summer holidays.

Sarah arrives in Merton to find that her clients consist of a dotty matriarch, two brothers (one nasty and one industrious), and a daughter sadly in search of self-esteem. And along a quay studded with cheap amusements and fish-and-chip wrappers lurks a ghost, a phantom who may be more dangerous than any flesh-and-blood villain--

About this title

From the Inside Flap

e's name belies her recent life. A beautiful red-haired attorney, she's still recovering from the macabre attack of a now-deceased client, Charles Tysall, who became obsessed with her. The scars on her creamy skin have healed but will never disappear. Now the senior partner in her firm has asked her to travel to the seaside town of Merton to sort out a legacy left to the feuding Pardoe family. It is the same town where Tysall spent her summer holidays.

Sarah arrives in Merton to find that her clients consist of a dotty matriarch, two brothers (one nasty and one industrious), and a daughter sadly in search of self-esteem. And along a quay studded with cheap amusements and fish-and-chip wrappers lurks a ghost, a phantom who may be more dangerous than any flesh-and-blood villain--

Reviews

With this nimble meld of ghost story, moral fable and psychological drama, Fyfield ( Shadow Play ; Question of Guilt ) joins the ranks of those writers--Peter Dickinson and Michael Dibdin among them--who reinvent the genre with social commentary and impressionistic narrative brushstrokes. Red-haired Sarah Fortune, a young and effortlessly attractive widowed lawyer, goes to East Anglia to sort out the muddled legal affairs of the family of recently deceased Henry Pardoe. In the same seaside town two years earlier, red-haired Elisabeth Tysall committed suicide by drowning. A year later her husband Charles--who had also been violently obsessed with Sarah--did the same, walking into the sea. While villagers report sightings of both Tysall ghosts, Sarah gradually discerns the twists within the troubled Pardoe family. She deals with a pouting, brutal younger son, a bitter older son (a doctor and once the lover of Elisabeth Tysall) and a teenaged daughter in love with a local boy; the widow Pardoe appears to be over-the-top loony. Honing in on their secrets, Sarah gradually reveals secrets of her own. This is a complex, unsettling novel.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Fyfield continues her assault on the English Gothic (Shadow Play, 1993, etc.; see also Half Light, as Frances Hegarty, 1993) in this tale of Sarah Fortune, unassuming solicitor dispatched to the Norfolk village of Merton on Sea to help the fractious Pardoes divide the spoils of Henry Pardoe's estate. As capable Sarah nestles awkwardly into a family that includes Henry's placidly senile widow, Jennifer (``Mouse''), and his children Julian (an embittered physician), Edward (a realtor who won't grow up), and Joanna (a kid sister trapped at home), Sarah recalls her uneasy involvement with their abusive, late neighbor Charles Tysall, whose wife, Elisabeth (like Sarah, a redhead Charles had become obsessed with), killed herself to escape him, and who followed her into sucide shortly thereafter. The sense of menace is compounded by rumors of a violent white- haired ghost prowling the coastline, but despite the unforgettable tableaux Fyfield's readers have come to expect--especially Sarah's breakthough scenes with Julian, Mouse, and a battered local boy--the persistent echoes of Robert Browning's ``Porphyria's Lover'' never ignite this doomy tale. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Fyfield's Sarah Fortune stories shouldn't work. Her characters are odd even by the standards of British mysteries. Coincidences and improbabilities power her plots, yet they make sense, somehow, in the alternative reality she creates. This time mentor Ernest Matthewson sends solicitor Sarah to the "overgrown village of Merton on Sea" to resolve estate matters for a former client's survivors--and to ease a separation between Sarah and his stepson, Malcolm, who saved her life in a previous Fortune novel. But Sarah's attacker drowned in Merton, and his brutalized wife committed suicide there, so memories of past pain mingle with the woes of batty Mrs. Pardoe and her children: the intense physician Julian; angry and neurotic Edward; and teenager Joanna, torn by hopes and doubts. Fyfield confronts central human dichotomies here--good and evil, madness and sanity, love and hate, the seductive appeals of revenge and of forgiveness--in a taut and involving thriller that demands suspension of disbelief against all odds. Mary Carroll

Another psychological mystery for readers who appreciate a protagonist with a lawyerly viewpoint. Sarah Fortune's law firm posts her to a seaside town to do estate work for a peculiar family characterized by weird members and dangerous secrets.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Pantheon
• Publication date: 1994
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0679426655
• ISBN 13: 9780679426653
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 207