False Pretences (CH) - Hardcover

Yorke, Margaret

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0708990819 ISBN 13: 9780708990810

Publisher: Charnwood, 1999

Synopsis

'The mistress of the skilfully spun suspense novel...her quiet, unemphatic style of narrative makes the story a compelling read' - SUNDAY TELEGRAPH 'Yorke has an extraordinary feel for the passions that lurk beneath unremarkable facades' - SUNDAY TIMES When her goddaughter is arrested during an anti-roads protest, Isabel Vernon is startled to discover that the fair-haired child of her memory has become a shaven-headed environmentalist and that Isabel herself is now regarded as Emily Frost's next of kin. Emily, released on bail to the Vernons, takes up a job as home help to a local family and forms an instant attachment to Rowena, the four-year-old girl in her charge. Emily's presence in the Vernons' house proves troubling, and is deepening the profound tensions within Isabel's marriage when the arrival of someone else threatens the safety of both Emily and the child, Rowena.

About this title

About the Author

Margaret Yorke is a past chairman of the Crime Writers' Association. She has been a writer for over twenty years and her outstanding contribution to the genre has recently been recognised by the award of the 1999 CWA Cartier Diamond Dagger.

From Kirkus Reviews

Life, it seems, continues on an imperturbable course in cozy Northtown until the arrival of two strangers. One is Emily Frost, whom her godmother Isabel Vernon, though she hasn't seen her for many years, bails out of prison after she's arrested for an environmental demonstration turned violent. The other is Godfrey Sutton, paid off long ago to leave sheltered Alice Watkinson alone, who now returns to find that he's got a four-year-old daughter, Rowena. With a few deft strokes, Yorke (Act of Violence, 1998, etc.) brings these two lost souls together but doesn't move them to share their secrets: Godfrey, that Rowena Watkinson is the daughter he's determined to get access to; Emily, that she isn't Emily Frost at all. As the two plot at darkly comic cross-purposesGodfrey's designs against Alice and the frail parents who booted him out turning from extortion to abductionYorke patiently reveals the ways in which these two pariahs are expressing the resentment that's already been seething inside lonely Alice Watson and ill-matched Isabel and her primly minatory husband Douglas, civil servant and landscape gardener (one of the authors slyest portraits of engorged self-satisfaction). Even after the final quiet twist, you'll be wishing you could spend more time among Yorke's dextrously skewered misfits. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Charnwood
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0708990819
• ISBN 13: 9780708990810
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 384