False Pretences - Hardcover

Yorke, Margaret

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0316644382 ISBN 13: 9780316644389

Publisher: Little, Brown, 1998

Synopsis

Although she hadn't seen her god-daughter for several years, Isabel feels duty-bound to help when Emily gets into trouble and takes her under her wing. To her surprise Emily is determined not to be a sponger and gets herself a job as nanny. Emily discovers her charge is illegitimate, the offspring of the naïve daughter of a well-to-do couple and a ne'er-do-well conman who disappeared before the baby was born. Now, unknown to Emily, he is back and determined to exploit his status as parent in return for some cash, and she is violently caught up in his botched attempts at blackmail. Desperately trying to protect her charge from physical and psychological harm, Emily also tries to shield Isabel from becoming entangled in the drama. Then events beyond her control force her to act instinctively but with horrendous effect as her own and other lives are put at risk. Once again Margaret Yorke uses the effect of extraordinary events on every day lives to gripping effect in a tense and chilling novel of suspense.

About this title

Review

Middle-aged and middle-class, clean-living Isabel Vernon's world is turned upside down by the arrival of her not-so-clean-living, long-lost goddaughter, Emily Frost. Overweight and shaven-haired, Emily, who was arrested after a scuffle with police on the site of an anti-road protest camp, swaps her unconventional tree-house for the conventional, highly sanitized commuter belt des res of Isabel and husband Douglas, an emotionally clipped civil servant with a penchant for pergolas and similar, carefully structured, garden features. Living with the Vernons as a condition of bail turns out to be the best thing that has happened to Emily for some time and she soon warms to her clean, comfortable home and temporary job as a nanny/housekeeper. Douglas, however, is less impressed and, before long, even his cynical suspicions are far surpassed by reality.

Margaret Yorke, a past chairman of the Crime Writers' Association, with an impressive string of more than 40 novels to her name, has produced a traditional murder mystery against a topical, contemporary backdrop. Her easy style and descriptive narrative of the ordinary folk of Middle England belie her considerable skill at spinning a complex plot, where both heroines and villains turn out to have far more to them than originally meets the eye. --Carey Green

Review

Her short, sparse accounts of things going wrong and innocent people getting caught up in events beyond their control never fails to induce a powerful sesne of apprehension and foreboding. (GUARDIAN)

wholly-and distressingly- believable. (TLS)

Yorke has an extraordinary feel for the passions that lurk beneath unremarkable facades (Sunday TIMES)

About this edition

• Publisher: Little, Brown
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0316644382
• ISBN 13: 9780316644389
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 320