The Dark Backward

Blissfully married to the man with whom she had shared a whirlwind courtship, Mary Reynolds is shocked when Geoffrey disappears, and she learns how much she did not know about him. Reprint.

British writer Hall's suspenseful first novel finds an American editor, Mary Reynolds, in love and in deep trouble in the English countryside. When Mary meets Geoffrey, an attractive English journalist who daintily avoids answering questions about his past, she tumbles quickly into an engagement. Soon the newlyweds buy a house in Norfolk, a little cottage where strange events occur?beginning on Mary's first day there without Geoffrey, when a crippled dog crawls to their door only to be shot by a wealthy neighbor. Days later, Mary finds her husband dead in the forest, with no reasonable explanation for his demise but with questions that lead only to more questions. She begins to follow clues, and the chase for the truth is on. Hall takes some risks by writing from the point of view of an American woman. Readers may find amusingly improbable the British slang that rolls off Mary's tongue: "gubbins"; "jinked"; "judder." The author's prose is chatty rather than precise, moreover, and at times readers will discover more than what's necessary about the lives of one character or another while impatiently waiting for the story to continue its tense stalk toward the terrible secret that surely must be lurking in the final pages.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.