 |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
UK Authors - Mystery |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
The Devil’s Highway |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 The Devil’s Highway byHannah March Headline 312 pages, 1999 ISBN 0747222010 Reviewed by our UK Editor Rachel A. Hyde Robert Fairfax, itinerant tutor, sometimes sleuth and hero of Complaint of the Dove is back again. It is 1761 and he has a new position to take up, cataloguing the library of a country gentleman in Lincolnshire. The road along which he and his employer are travelling is notorious as the haunt of a highwayman, and soon they discover some of his handiwork for the London to Stamford stagecoach lies overturned in a ditch and all three of the occupants have been shot dead. The driver lingers on a few moments only and whispers that they have indeed been the victims of the dreaded highwayman. But more surprises await them, as one of the dead passengers in the overturned coach is not the unpopular local banker but somebody disguised as him, while the other is an escaped lunatic. And where is the third passenger, the mysterious and missing Mrs. Parry? An enthusiastic Methodist preacher, a greedy miser with a private army and an over-jolly private asylum owner are just three of the other characters in this teasing tale. The plot veers this way and that, and I for one didn’t manage to guess it all. March writes in an engaging, easy-to-read style and draws the reader in from the very beginning to her well-spun web of a story. She is adept at delineating characters with just a few telling phrases. Although one of the underlying themes of the novel is the unenviable lack of freedom known by women in those times - and men too if they didn’t have money or position - it enhances rather than detracts from the plot. This was a well-paced, exciting book, and I eagerly await the third installment of Fairfax’s adventures, A Distinction of Blood. |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||