The Grenadillo Box
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- £4.99
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- £4.99
Publisher Description
It is New Year's Day 1755 and Nathaniel Hopson, journeyman to the famous cabinetmaker Thomas Chippendale, finds himself drawn into a chilling affair. While working at the country home of Lord Montfort, Nathaniel discovers his patron shot dead in his magnificent new library. The conclusion seems obvious: burdened with gambling debts and recently possessed of a melancholic nature, Montfort must have taken his own life, but Nathaniel is not convinced. While the gun near Montfort's hand suggests suicide, what of the blood on the windowsill and the confusion of footprints on the library floor? And there is another strange detail: the small, elaborately carved box of rare grenadillo wood clutched in the aristocrat's lifeless hand.
No sooner has Nathaniel been set up as a most unlikely investigator than another body is found, frozen and cruelly mutilated. Nathaniel's detachment is shattered. He knows the victim well - but what was he doing on Montfort's country estate? Nathaniel's investigation will take him from palatial drawing rooms to the slums of Fleet Street and London's Foundling Hospital, where the identity of a child abandoned twenty years ago may hold the key to the mystery. But someone has already killed to keep this secret and each step Nathaniel takes on his journey is a step further into danger.
As intricately crafted as a Chippendale cabinet, THE GRENADILLO BOX is both an utterly irresistible detective story and a vibrant recreation of eighteenth-century England, and marks the fiction debut of this supremely accomplished writer.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Connoisseurs of fine furniture will welcome British antiques expert Gleeson's fiction debut, set in 18th-century England, though mystery buffs may feel it falls short of the high standard for historicals set, say, by Bruce Alexander in his John Fielding series. While supervising the installation of Lord Montfort's library, Nathaniel Hopson, an assistant to legendary cabinet-maker Thomas Chippendale, finds himself in the midst of a murder inquiry when he literally stumbles across the peer's corpse, mutilated by a gunshot wound and still being fed upon by leeches. Despite efforts by Montfort's heirs to make the death appear to be a suicide, Hopson's keen artisan's eye notices anomalies in the physical evidence that lead him to dissent. His desire to extricate himself from the official investigation and return to his normal life is forestalled when he encounters another corpse on the Montfort estate, one with a personal connection that transforms his idle curiosity into a personal mission of vengeance. While Gleeson does a respectable job of recreating Georgian England, her characters and story line fail to match her descriptive skills. Still, there's no reason to think that she can't improve on the fundamentals should she decide to make this into a series. , Gleeson is well positioned to promote this novel to cultured readers who might not ordinarily pick up a category mystery.
