Picture of Innocence - Hardcover

McGown, Jill

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0449002500 ISBN 13: 9780449002506

Publisher: Ballantine Books, 1998

Synopsis

Acclaimed author Jill McGown has a dazzling way with words, creating characters and stories both rich and dark, complex and powerful. Now, in her new ingeniously plotted novel of suspense, honest greed is the basis for a thoroughly bizarre marriage . . . and vicious murder.

East Midlands farmer Bernard Bailey, a violent man with a brutal temper, stands to pocket a hefty inheritance if he fathers a male child. After destroying one wife to achieve this end, Bailey turns his next marriage into a twisted business arrangement. If his new spouse produces a son, she will be paid handsomely for her trouble. But the real trouble is just beginning.

After six months of receiving highly publicized death threats, and having a state-of-the-art security system installed on his property, Bailey becomes just another statistic--a bloodied corpse discarded on his secluded farm. This gruesome homicide launches Detective Chief Inspector Lloyd and Detective Inspector Judy Hill into one of the most unusual investigations of their careers. The question is not "Who stands to gain from his death?" but "Why wasn't the monster killed sooner?" For Bailey aroused strong, murderous passions in just about everyone in Bartonshire, from the abused daughter of his first marriage to his second wife's clandestine lover. But beneath the obvious lies a labyrinth of deceit--and the shocking truth lies deeper still.

Picture of Innocence is a mesmerizing masterpiece of psychological puzzle-solving--Jill McGown's best novel yet.

About this title

Review:

Balancing the personal and the professional side of an ongoing relationship has always been one of the hardest tricks to pull off in a mystery series. Nobody does it better then Jill McGown, whose books about Welsh police officers Detective Chief Inspector Lloyd (like Morse, he never uses his first name) and Detective Inspector Judy Hill deserve much more attention than they've received so far. "They were in her flat, which was highly unusual, but it had been the only way he was going to get to see her watch herself on television for the first time," McGown writes in a typically terse moment of revelation. "He resisted coming to her flat very often; it seemed to him to be sanctioning their private lives. But she had refused point-blank to come home with him this evening, so he had turned up here just before her debut, relieving her of the remote control as she had threatened to turn off the TV." When the brutal owner of a large farm gets death threats and then is murdered, suspicion naturally centers on his gorgeous young wife--who married him strictly for the money she would get if she bore him a son. But the dead man's abused daughter has plenty of motive, and a rising TV interviewer who seems intent on ruining Lloyd's career is also a likely suspect. Two other Lloyd and Hill books available in paperback: Murder...Now and Then and Murder at the Old Vicarage. --Dick Adler

From the Publisher:

I am always fighting temptation here at Ballantine -- so many books, so little time! But I have absolutely no resistance to any Jill McGown book because she writes traditional mysteries wrapped in the cloak of a novel, creating intriguing and believable characters placed in situations they can't easily resolve. Most of Jill's books feature an English team of male/female homicide detectives, Lloyd and Hill. PICTURE OF INNOCENCE is my favorite: the story is both horrifying and intriguing with a monstrous villain, an enigmatic and unlikely heroine -- and a totally unpredictable and nail-biting plot. I loved it...I hope you do.

--Tanya Thompson, Executive Assistant

About this edition

• Publisher: Ballantine Books
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0449002500
• ISBN 13: 9780449002506
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 325