You can use your Boston Public Library card to borrow titles from these partner libraries:
1 of 1 copy available
Lady Lucy Vereker Seddon is dying of a terminal illness when something she hears on the radio reminds her of her younger, darker days and inspires her to question her dearest friend and former lover, Paul Ackerley, about his role in a series of past family tragedies. There was the strange death of Lucy’s brother-in-law, the brute Gerry Grantworth, in the Yellow Room of Blatchards—the huge and ugly Vereker estate—and the subsequent destruction by fire of the sprawling manor house. And then there was the infamous Seddon Affair, the sordid scandal that rocked Great Britain in the midst of the Suez Crisis.
Surprised to hear that the woman he has always loved suspects him to be the culprit behind these events—especially since he always assumed Lucy herself helped engineer them—Paul suggests that they each record their memories and compare them. By doing so, perhaps they will both find their way to the long-hidden and terrible truth.
Told through an alternating series of memories and flashbacks, The Yellow Room Conspiracy brilliantly re-creates a post-war era and a world of privilege corrupted by greed, jealousy, lust, and lies. The astonishing Peter Dickinson, one of Britain’s greatest suspense novelists of the late twentieth century, ingeniously wraps a love story around a mystery and once again solidifies his position alongside luminaries such as P. D. James, Ruth Rendell, Peter Lovesey, and Reginald Hill.
-
Creators
-
Publisher
-
Release date
May 5, 2015 -
Formats
-
Kindle Book
-
OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9781504004923
- File size: 593 KB
-
EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9781504004923
- File size: 1311 KB
-
-
Languages
- English
-
Reviews
-
May 2, 1994
The yellow room was one of about 50 in Blatchards, an old mansion near Bury St. Edmonds. Owned by Lord Vereker, Blatchards was dominated by his five striking daughters whose politics and personal lives in the 1930s and '40s are at the heart of Dickinson's bittersweet and subtly compelling tale. Flashbacks told in alternating chapters by Lucy Vereker, the third daughter, and her lover Paul Ackerley, now near the end of their lives, describe events that culminated in the 1956 fire that destroyed the house, an event that each one thought the other may have, in different ways, engineered. The fire covered up evidence about the death--accident, suicide or murder?--of Gerry Grantworth, the eldest daughter's husband, and coincided with a public scandal involving Lucy's husband, Tommy Seddon, the Lord Seneschal. Intelligence work (during and after WW II and involving Lucy, Paul and Gerry), delicate Foreign Office operations and financial misdealings mix with sexual liaisons, marriages and life-long romances and jealousies in the rapidly shifting postwar culture. Deft and absorbing, Dickinson's ( Play Dead ; The Last Houseparty ) latest is as much a story of enduring love--of people and a way of life--as it is an intriguing mystery.
-