Marjorie Eccles was born in Yorkshire and spent much of her childhood there and on the Northumbrian coast. She is the recipient of the Agatha Christie Short Story Styles Award. A keen gardener, she lives with her husband in Hertfordshire.
The Cuckoo's Child
eBook
-
ISBN-13:
9781780100623
- Publisher: Severn House Publishers
- Publication date: 11/01/2011
- Sold by: Barnes & Noble
- Format: eBook
- Pages: 256
- Sales rank: 147,252
- File size: 398 KB
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A young woman comes of age and discovers her hidden past in this gripping historical mystery set in the north of England.
England, 1909. When twenty-one-year-old Laura Harcourt accepts a position in Wainthorpe, a small Yorkshire town, to catalog books in an old manor house owned by wealthy local Ainsley Beaumont, she does not dream that it will change her life forever. But she arrives to find the Beaumont family still torn apart by the death of Ainsley’s son in a disastrous fire twenty years past. Worse still, the damaged wing of the house remains untouched. When a dead body surfaces in the water at Beaumont’s mill, long-buried secrets soon follow—including Laura’s unexpected connection to the Beaumont family. Rendered in exquisite period detail, Cuckoo’s Child is a moving, suspenseful mystery of love, lies, and murder.
“Eccles’ latest enjoyably blends historical romance and suspenseful murder mystery in a keep-’em-guessing plot with revealing insights into English society at the time and authentic period ambience. Entertaining reading for fans of British historicals.” —Booklist
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The paterfamilias passes away, 1909.
Wealthy mill owner Ainsley Beaumont succumbs to his fate after falling into the Cross Ings Mill dam, helped along by a stout cosh with a stone. The obvious suspects are his bad-tempered, widowed daughter-in-law Amelia and her twins Gideon, who's eager to modernize the mill and improve its working conditions, and Una, who's determined to follow Mrs. Pankhurst's example and liberate women. But it would be premature to rule out Beaumont's partners at cards, Whiteley Hirst, the mill manager saddled by debt, and Dr. Widdop, who knows many of the secrets of the local Yorkshire women. And of course there is the surprise inheritor of £15,000: Laura Harcourt, who had been in Beaumont's employ organizing his library for only a week. Is the death connected to the fire 20 years back that gutted one wing of Beaumont's home and killed his son? Does it have to do with a missive stashed away on a high shelf in his library explaining the plight of Benjamin Kindersley and Lucie Picard, one long gone, the other dead soon after childbirth? Laura's meeting with handsome engineer Tom Illingworth on the moor bringsJane Eyre to mind. But there are enough marital infidelities and scandalous births, suffragette pamphleteering and trade union speeches to invoke a whole shelf of period fiction.
Eccles (The Shape of Sand, 2005, etc.) so overstuffs her plot that one can only pity the poor inspector who must wade through all this pother on the eve of his retirement.