Martin is drifting through his own life, living with a
friend who is already a little tired of his presence.
Unemployed, divorced and a schoolteacher without a job, he
leapt on the chance to go visit his friend, Alec Fowler, in
Madeira.
Once on the beautiful island, Martin meets a wealthy South
African who has a historical mystery he'd like Martin to
solve. So begins Martin's path into a memoir written by an
Edwardian cabinet minister, Edwin Strafford. The mystery is
why Edwin, who was at the peak of his career, suddenly
resigned and also parted from his fiancée.
Martin eagerly reads the memoir and becomes intrigued with
Edwin's life and the mystery of what caused him to resign
and disappear from public life. What he doesn't expect is
that his investigation into the decades-old mystery will
lead him toward crimes that have never been solved.
Goddard's thoughtful, compelling writing draws you slowly
into this novel. Maybe just a tad too slowly. The memoir is
printed in italics within the pages, so the reader skips
between the two "books," and it took me around 50 pages
before I began to be intrigued with the mystery of
Strafford's life. But then the complexity and elegant
narrative that Goddard does so well pulled me into the
story and compelled me toward the end. An excellent book.
At a lush villa on the sun-soaked island of Madeira,
Martin Radford is given a second chance. His life ruined
by scandal, Martin holds in his hands the leather-bound
journal of another ruined man, former British cabinet
minister Edwin Strafford. What’s more, Martin is being
offered a job—to return to England and investigate the
rise and fall of Strafford, an ambitious young politician
whose downfall, in 1910, is as mysterious as the strange
deaths that still haunt his family.
Martin is intrigued by Strafford’s story, by the man’s
overwhelming love for a beautiful suffragette, by her
inexplicable rejection of him and their love affair’s
political repercussions. But as he retraces Strafford’s
ruination, Martin realizes that Strafford did not fall by
chance; he was pushed. Suddenly Martin, who has not cared
for many people in his life, cares desperately—about a
man’s mysterious death and a family’s terrible secret,
about a love beyond reckoning and betrayal beyond
imagining. Most of all Martin cares because the story he
is uncovering is not yet over—and among the men and women
still caught in its web, Martin himself may be the most
vulnerable of all….
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