The Shape of Sand
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Life at Charnley was blessed, or at least so it seemed to the Jardine children. But one night their dreams of a propitious future suddenly come crashing down when a family scandal catapults them into the headlines.
Nearly four decades pass and the Second World War is won, but still the exact events of that fateful night remain unknown. However, when builders working on Charnley uncover a shoebox stuffed full of old letters, photographs, and a diary, it finally seems as though some of the answers are within reach.
The clue to unraveling the affair lies in a voyage to Egypt undertaken by Beatrice eleven years before her disappearance. With the help of her old diary, Beatrice's three daughters set about uncovering the truth. But when the mummified body of a brutally murdered woman is discovered in the ruins of their old home, they have a whole new set of questions.
Beautifully written, evoking the life of the Edwardian upper classes, bomb-scarred, post war England, and the sultry Egyptian landscape, The Shape of Sand proclaims the incomparable talent of this great author.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Eccles, best known for her cozy police procedurals (Untimely Graves, etc.), delivers a stellar stand-alone, a novel of suspense set in post-WWII Britain that harks back to the early 20th century. In 1946, when Harriet Jardine receives a cardboard box of letters and notebooks found during the demolition and remodeling of Charnley, her family's former country house, she knows that she and her two sisters will have to face memories they would rather leave alone in particular, their mother's disappearance decades earlier after an elaborate birthday party. Determined to seek out the truth, Harriet and her sisters act on one clue to their mother's fate by organizing a trip to Egypt, but when a mummified body turns up in the walls of Charnley, Harriet looks for answers closer to home. In lyrical prose, Eccles contrasts the world of Edwardian society, with its frivolous fashions and its prescribed manners and mores, with the devastating changes wrought by two world wars. Fine characterizations and an absorbing plot will please not just fans of Eccles's Supt. Gil Mayo series.
