A Mansion and Its Murder. Robert Barnard - Softcover

Barnard, Robert

3.34

80 ratings by Goodreads

9780749010379: A Mansion and Its Murder. Robert Barnard

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0749010371 ISBN 13: 9780749010379

Publisher: Allison & Busby, Limited, 2012

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Sarah Jane Fearing, the sole offspring of a father who desperately wants a male heir, has grown up in the imposing rural mansion of one of England's most influential banking families. At the centre of Sarah's world stands her charming, generous uncle Frank, the only relative who seems to have escaped the straitjacket of ponderous respectability that so effectively stifles the Fearing family. Frank's rebellions afford Sarah delight and hope, until his extravagant lifestyle leads him deeper into debt and manoeuvres him into a disastrous marriage.
Frank's wedding to a coldly ambitious woman produces the family's longed-for male scion, but the parents fall to quarrels, and then to murder. And Sarah is drawn inexorably into a morass that threatens the survival of the entire family.
From the Belle �poque at the end of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth, A Mansion and its Murder holds its secrets to its last suspenseful moment, and proves again the author's mettle as a mastermind of the English traditional mystery.

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About the Author:

Robert Barnardwas educated at Balliol College, Oxford and taught English at universities in Australia and Norway, where he completed his doctorate on Dickens. In 2003 Robert Barnard was the recipient of the prestigious CWA Cartier Diamond Dagger Award. Robert lives in Leeds, UK.

From Kirkus Reviews:

From the perspective of half a century later, Sarah Jane Fearing, the unwilling heiress of Fearing's Bank, tells the slender tale of how her beloved Uncle Frank, eager to pay off his many debts at the same time he accommodated the family frantic for a male heir, entered a bargain in 1893 to marry Mary Coverdale, impeccably pedigreed, coldly attractive, and professionally focused on reigning as chatelaine over Blakemere. The bargain turns into a disaster for everyone concerned when Frank and Mary's firstborn son turns out to be retarded; Frank and his family clash over whether Frank has fulfilled his promise to provide them with a male heir; and a ceremonious family conference erupts in what Sarah is convinced is a murder--followed by the disappearance of Frank (to Australia, so they say) and Mary (back to her older, and now wiser, family), and by the suspicious enrichment of potential witnesses. Robert Barnard, writing in his Bastable guise (Too Many Notes, Mr. Mozart, 1996, etc.) adroitly uses his story to point a familiar moral about the poisoned alliance between self-regarding old British families and the money they demand to support themselves, though the moral turns out to have an extra point at the end. A miniature so exquisitely crafted that you almost forget it's really a Robert Barnard short story writ large. -- Copyright �1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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