When The Dead Cry Out

Oct 31, 2024 3:34 PM

Author:Hilary Bonner

One summer day Clara Marshall vanished without trace. A few days later, her children, six-year-old Lorraine and five-year-old Janine, also disappeared and were never seen again. Richard Marshall, Clara's heartbroken husband, claimed he had discovered his wife was having an affair with an Australian backpacker and that she had run away with him, taking the children with her, destroying the family for ever.

That was twenty-seven years ago. John Kelly, veteran journalist, covered the case when he was a trainee reporter and he suspected something far more sinister. Police enquiries discovered no Australian backpacker and the biggest missing persons operation ever mounted in the south of England revealed nothing. Detective Superintendent Karen Meadows has been familiar with case since childhood and she is only too aware that many suspect Marshall of murdering his wife and children. But where are the bodies? And what is the motive? Then extraordinary events reawaken the case and Kelly and Karen become determined to discover what happened to Clara and her children so long ago, and to seek justice for them...

Reviews

Leon's books are a joy, and the 19th Venice-based Commissario Brunetti novel is well up to her consistently high standard

—— Guardian

Leon excels in the claustrophobia of families, the Italian class system and the sinister aspects of Venice that the tourists don't see

—— Marcel Berlins , The Times

To read a Donna Leon novel is to have an armchair holiday in her lovingly described Venice, in the company of an old friend - the amiable Commissario Brunetti . . . Leon never fails to impress with her carefully wrought plots and believable characters

—— Daily Mail

Knowingness, or an illusion of knowingness, is essential to successful crime-writing . . . Donna Leon has mastered this technique perfectly

—— Jonathan Keates , TLS

Donna Leon has established a special hold on the reader's imagination, so it is almost easier to imagine the Commissario returning to lunch with his feisty wife, just round the corner, than almost any other fiction character in the immortal (we hope) city. . . A Question of Belief is particularly enjoyable...Donna Leon's great skill is to invest the characters in her crime novels with a kind of humanity, even the wrongdoers. . . [a] marvellous evocation of the magic city, and its inhabitants of all types

—— Antonia Fraser , The Lady

We could recognise her characters as easily as our colleagues if we saw them on the bus . . . an absorbing, portentfull depiction of Italian society, where superstition and old taboos still exert a powerful grip. Brunetti is in typically quizzical form. Shrewd yet appealingly emotional, he acts as a seductive guide to a country, and a city, depicted as slowly sinking under the weight of legal sleight-of-hand and pernicious networks of influence among the great and the good

—— Rosemary Goring , The Herald

A welcome addition to a hugely popular series with an unparalleled feel for the glorious city of Venice

—— Waterstones Books Quarterly

Wonderful

—— Mirror

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