Against the Light

by Marjorie Eccles

Overview

A baby is kidnapped – and the repercussions reach the highest levels of government in this absorbing historical mystery.

London, April, 1912. The third Irish Home Rule Bill is passing through Parliament and the situation is growing ever more tense. Closely involved in the negotiations, cabinet minister Edmund Latimer finds himself under growing pressure – which only intensifies when his seventh-month-old niece Lucy is snatched away in her pram in Regent’s Park.

Could there be a connection between Lucy’s kidnapping and the Irish talks? With her husband under intolerable strain, Edmund’s wife Alice makes it her business to find out. But the more she discovers, the more she realizes how little she really knows the man she married five years before.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780727895424
Publisher:	Severn House
Publication date:	06/30/2017
Edition description:	Large Print
Pages:	336
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.75(h) x (d)

About the Author

Marjorie Eccles was born in Yorkshire and has since spent some time on the Northumbrian coast. Marjorie has written mainly crime novels, but also some romantic fiction. She is the author of the ‘Gill Mayo’ mystery series.

Editorial Reviews

"I recommend this book for fans of Tessa Arlen and Agatha Christie."

Lauralee J

07/04/2016
Set in April 1912, this socially illuminating standalone from Eccles (The Firebird’s Feather) focuses on Edmund Latimer, a wealthy MP and cabinet minister, and his physician wife, Alice. They have felt comfortable and protected in the large Regent’s Park home that they share with his sister, Violet; Violet’s husband, Ferdie; and the couple’s baby, Lucy; but they find themselves suddenly vulnerable. The touchy subject in Parliament is the Irish Home Rule question. Edmund is working long hours and showing the strain, while Alice is exposed to the Home Rule controversy through her work at the medical clinic. Activists and street gangs complicate an already tense situation that hits the family more personally with kidnapping, murder, and threats to their personal safety. Is it only the Irish situation causing the uncertainty and fear Alice feels? Or is it also her growing concern about her marriage and the family? Eccles’s usual strong sense of time and place, as well as the growing unease over political events, overshadow the less developed plot and characters. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

2016-07-20
The Irish Home Rule Bill unnerves many politicians in 1912. But could it be a motive for murder?Although Dr. Alice Latimer and her MP husband, Edmund, have discussed asking Alice’s cousin Dudley to move on after an extended visit, Alice is surprised when she returns home from her work in the London slums to find their guest gone and their household reduced to Edmund’s self-centered sister, Violet, her dapper husband, Ferdie, and their baby daughter, Lucy. When Lucy is kidnapped, everyone is frantic to help the police. DI Gaines and DS Inskip are already investigating the case of a man found in a taxi with his throat slit. Inskip is anxious to keep on the taxi case because one of the suspects is an Irishman he thinks drove his former sweetheart to suicide. Even after the family receives a crude ransom note asking for an outlandish sum of money, Gaines still thinks blackmail may be involved. When Lucy is unexpectedly returned unharmed, the family would prefer to forget the whole matter, but the police have other ideas, especially when they learn that the kidnapping might be tied to their murder case. The taxicab victim turns out to be Dudley, who's found to have been a rabid Irish nationalist. A good many scandalous revelations concerning the family emerge before the case can be closed.Eccles (Heirs and Assigns, 2015, etc.) starts out with a strong storyline and plenty of interesting characters, but her weak ending is a distinct letdown.

Kirkus Reviews