Mortal Remains - Hardcover

Hall, Gregory

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0002257297 ISBN 13: 9780002257299

Publisher: HarperCollins, 1999

Synopsis

A major new author in the Robert Goddard tradition joins HarperCollins.

Mortal Remains is a brilliantly plotted story of crime and passion that unravels in the double-narratives of a woman and her recently returned ne’er do well brother in a large house in Oxfordshire.

There are elements of crime and psychological thriller, but principally, this is just a fabulously good read that you could recommend to anybody who doesn’t mind staying up all night to finish a book.

About this title

Review:

“A splendid pacy blend of romance, thriller and scientific mystery with a compellingly intricate plot”
Robert Goddard

“A real mystery thriller. What an achievement to conceive such an ingenious combination of convoluted complications and how cunningly it all came right in the end. A really good read”
John Timpson

“Wonderfully atmospheric, with a hazy mist of violence and regret reminiscent of early Barbara Vine”
Sunday Times

“Literate and complex, THE DARK BACKWARD is a riveting journey through the dark side of human nature... Every page brings new surprises, as we race along, compelled to unravel the strands that Hall has so masterfully woven together”
Jeffrey Deaver

“Occasionally it happens! A reviewer picks up a first novel by an unknown author and finds he has a jewel. That is the case with The Dark Backward”
Books Magazine

“This atonishingly assured first novel falls into
‘rattlingly good thriller’
category. The tension builds relentlessly: I couldn’t put the book down till the last paragraph and that was at 3 am”
Good Housekeeping

“A highly impressive debut... wonderfully atmospheric with a hazy mist of violence and regret reminiscent of early Barbara Vine”
The Sunday Times

From the Back Cover:

A MESMERISING THRILLER BY THE AUTHOR OF 'THE DARK BACKWARD'

The tranquil beauty of an Oxfordshire village is ruined by the discovery of a human skeleton during an archaeological dig. These remains are not Roman, but all too obviously much more recent. And for the dig's organiser, disgraced academic Jack Armitage, the revelation is particularly painful. He's always believed that his father was a traitor who abandoned his family for another woman; but it looks as if his destiny was far more violent.

For Jack's sister, Liz, the past is equally hard to bear. Now she teaches at the local comprehensive, a fate far beneath the gilded promise she displayed so dazzlingly in her all-conquering youth, before fickle reality dstroyed her hopes. Yet brother and sister know that to understand the present one must acknowledge the past: and every secret they and their parents had ever hoped to hide is about to rise up in vengeance.

What the Armitages cannot realise is that others too would rather the bones had remained safely buried. From one low-key excavation spins a spiral of deception forty years old, encompassing personal lies, public fraud, forged provenances and false identities. A legacy of close conspiracy endangers Liz and Jack, as they sift their inheritance of troubled history and ancient crimes. Someone has decided there is one way to stop the ultimate solution from coming to light, and Jack's dig will put more than one body in the earth...

'Mortal Remains' is an astonishingly audacious novel of intricate complexity, in which the blurred distinction between truth and illusion, fake and authentic, is exploited to its most entertaining limit.

“A splendidly pacy blend of romance, thriller and scientific mystery with a compellingly intricate plot”
ROBERT GODDARD

“A highly impressive debut...wonderfully atmospheric with a hazy mist of violence and regret reminiscent of early Barbara Vine”
SUNDAY TIMES

About this edition

• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0002257297
• ISBN 13: 9780002257299
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 400