A Far and Deadly Cry
Bantam Books 1995
ISBN 0-553-56859
Christina says:
Three years ago Tom Grayson, a poet and terrorist, shot himself in the
church of his home village Fetherbridge when he was surrounded by the
police. Now Chief Inspector Daniel Halford and Sergeant Maura Ramsden of
Scotland Yard once more have to visit the idyllic village in Southern
England because Lisa Stillwell, a girl who worked for Grayson’s widow,
was found dead on a road. Everybody in the village felt somehow
responsible for motherless Lisa and almost everybody is more than willing
to point an accusing finger at the woman they blame for Fetherbridge’s
loss of innocence: Gayle Grayson.
But Halford and Ramsden soon realize that there’s something hidden
under the smooth surface of the village life and that even here nothing is
as it seemed at first glance.
Gale Grayson is an American historian who came into Hampshire when she
got married. Together with her imaginative 3-year-old Katie Pru she forms
a unique team who have to find their way facing the hostility of their
neighbors and the suspicions of the police.
American journalist Teri Holbrook manages to transfer the reader to the
fictitious model village of Fetherbridge, established in the 18th
Century by a nobleman as a small, private Utopia and to this day resistant
to the influence of our modern times. Deftly she peels layer by layer off
the idyll until the truth is clearly visible. Her description of a small,
closely knit community reminded me a bit of Sharyn McCrumb’s Appalachian
folk ballad mysteries, only that Holbrook keeps the crime firmly in the
center of the story and doesn’t get lost as much in historical plotlines
as McCrumb sometimes does.
A FAR AND DEADLY CRY takes a while to get going but then it gets harder
and harder to extract oneself from the intricate web of relations between
Lisa Stillwell and the villagers. |
