May 9th, 2025
Home | Log in!

On Top Shelf
VIXENVIXEN
Fresh Pick
THE GREEK HOUSE
THE GREEK HOUSE

New Books This Week

Reader Games


The books of May are here—fresh, fierce, and full of feels.

Slideshow image


Since your web browser does not support JavaScript, here is a non-JavaScript version of the image slideshow:

slideshow image
Wedding season includes searching for a missing bride�and a killer . . .


slideshow image
Sometimes the path forward begins with a step back.


slideshow image
One island. Three generations. A summer that changes everything.


slideshow image
A snapshot made them legends. What it didn�t show could tear them apart.


slideshow image
This life coach will give you a lift!


slideshow image
A twisty, "addictive," mystery about jealousy and bad intentions


slideshow image
Trapped by magic, haunted by muses�she must master the cards before they�re lost to darkness.


slideshow image
Masquerades, secrets, and a forbidden romance stitched into every seam.


slideshow image
A vanished manuscript. A murdered expert. A castle full of secrets�and one sharp-witted sleuth.


Since your web browser does not support JavaScript, here is a non-JavaScript version of the image slideshow:

slideshow image
Two warrior angels. First friends, now lovers. Their future? A WILD UNKNOWN.


Touchstone

Touchstone, January 2008
by Laurie R. King

Bantam
Featuring: Harris Stuyvesant
560 pages
ISBN: 0553803557
EAN: 9780553803556
Hardcover
Add to Wish List


Purchase



"A well-done British mystery, with just that hint of Sherlockian style."

Fresh Fiction Review

Touchstone
Laurie R. King

Reviewed by Morgan Chilson
Posted December 15, 2007

Thriller Political | Mystery Historical

Harris Stuyvesant traveled to London from New York, a semi- disgraced U.S. agent for the Justice Department's Bureau of Investigation. Hoover let him go on this quest to find a bomber who Harris believed was an English Labour Party leader. Although no one else believed the man, Richard Bunsen, was guilty of the bombings, Harris convinced his boss to let him try to get evidence. But Harris was spending his own money and coming up with nothing that tied Bunsen to the bombings. And then he finally found someone in London's government who could help him, although he couldn't bring himself to trust the man. Aldous Carstairs had no obvious title, clearly doing something within the government that was top secret. But Carstairs said he could introduce Harris to a man, Capt. Bennett Grey, who would get him near Bunsen. But when Harris meets Grey, he finds a man devastated by war injuries and touting a strange, paranormal talent. Despite his distrust of Carstairs, Harris is immediately drawn to Grey -- but doesn't really know if he can trust either man. Harris' career rests on finding this bomber, and he can't go home without evidence. So he allies himself with Grey and Carstairs, two men who have a contentious relationship and may not even be able to help. What a wonderful foray into British mysteries! Ms. King has created a detective worthy of Holmes and yanks the reader subtly and strongly into a Great Britain recreating itself between the World Wars. An intelligent, complex, beautifully written novel.

Learn more about Touchstone

SUMMARY

It’s eight years after the Great War shattered Bennett Grey’s life, leaving him with an excruciating sensitivity to the potential of human violence, and making social contact all but impossible. Once studied by British intelligence for his unique abilities, Grey has withdrawn from a rapidly changing world—until an American Bureau of Investigation agent comes to investigate for himself Grey’s potential as a weapon in a vicious new kind of warfare. Agent Harris Stuyvesant desperately needs Grey’s help entering a world where the rich and the radical exist side by side—a heady mix of the powerful and the celebrated, among whom lurks an enemy ready to strike a deadly blow at democracy on both sides of the Atlantic.

Here, among a titled family whose servants dress in whimsical costumes and whose daughter conducts an open affair with a man who wants to bring down the government, Stuyvesant finds himself dangerously seduced by one woman and—even more dangerously—falling in love with another. And as he sifts through secrets divulged and kept, he uncovers the target of a horrifying conspiracy, and wonders if he can trust his touchstone, Grey, to reveal the most dangerous player of all ….


What do you think about this review?

Comments

No comments posted.

Registered users may leave comments.
Log in or register now!

 

 

 

© 2003-2025 off-the-edge.net  all rights reserved Privacy Policy