Act of Violence

by Margaret Yorke

Overview

Peaceful Mickleburgh is the perfect English market town - or so it seems. In fact, it is a perfectly constructed façade, having successfully hidden the secrets of its inhabitants for generations. But the casual murder of a man trying to prevent an act of vandalism shatters the genteel appearance.

Parents are forced to consider whether their children could be involved, friends avoid each other's eyes, and partners word their conversations carefully. Somebody in the community is close to the murderer - someone with a past that threatens to resurface, bringing damage and devastation to a whole community.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781405526616
Publisher:	Little, Brown Book Group
Publication date:	12/19/2013
Sold by:	Hachette Digital, Inc.
Format:	eBook
File size:	494 KB

About the Author

Margaret Yorke was awarded the 1999 Cartier Diamond Dagger for her outstanding contribution to the crime fiction genre. She was a past chairman of the Crime Writers' Association and the author of over 50 novels. She died in November 2012.
Margaret Yorke was awarded the 1999 Cartier Diamond Dagger for her outstanding contribution to the crime fiction genre. She was a past chairman of the Crime Writers' Association and the author of over 50 novels. She died in November 2012.

Editorial Reviews

On a quiet evening in the quiet English town of Deerton, violence erupts when four boys invade the home of schoolmate Barry Noakes, where Barry and three other friends (Jamie, Peter and Greg ) are settling in for a night of videos and pizza. As the ruffians begin trashing the house, Jamie runs to a neighbor, Daniel Stewart, for help. The melee spreads outside; Jamie is cut and the helpful neighbor is killed. Out of fear of retaliation, none of the four innocent boys dares to "grass on" (implicate) the troublemakers. Woven into the narrative is the first-person account of a woman who murdered the wife of her lover years ago, served time and has since put herself in practice as a counselor. Acceptance of responsibility, the destructiveness of secrets and the aftermath of tragedy are the themes of this absorbing novel by the prolific Yorke (Death on Account, etc.), former chair of Britain's Crime Writers Association. The tension leading to the young toughs' arrest is taut, and the identity of the murderess-turned-counselor kept cleverly obscured until the very end.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

One of the best British mystery writers (A Question of Belief, LJ 2/15/97) taps into the phenomenon of murder by children. Here, a small English village shudders after a murderous rampage by two schoolboys, but a manipulative local therapist seems unperturbed. For all collections.

Library Journal

No one, it seems, can close out the killing of Daniel Stewart. Jamie Preston, the boy who begged him to break up the schoolboy melee that led to his death, is torn between guilt at rousing him and determination not to peach on the bullies who stabbed him to death. Jamie's friends from Mickleburgh Comprehensive, just as scared and obdurate, are no more help to the investigating police. The vengeful vows of Daniel's son Mark ring hollow; his harmless widow Midge can't forgive herself for her failure to go out with him; and his well-cushioned friends Oliver and Sarah Foxton are sharply divided over how, and how much, they can help her. Into this mess of grief and guilt, limned with her customary surgical precision, Yorke drops a wild card: Wendy Tyler, a counselor lately arrived in Mickleburgh who has spent the past several years not in training but, rather, in serving out a long sentence for murdering her lover's wife. Entranced with the control her adopted profession gives her over her clients, and bent on adding Midge to their number, Wendy, in a hideously effective series of parodies of therapeutic dialogue, succeeds in laying bare every well-meaning pretense of the cast, providing, in the end, closure of a most untherapeutic sort. Like the best of Yorke's many quietly chilling novels (A Question of Belief, 1997, etc.), this one links events that in advance are seemingly unpredictableþand are utterly inevitable in retrospect.

Kirkus Reviews