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HOLLOW CROWN
by David Roberts
Carroll & Graf, January 2003
309 pages
$24.00
ISBN: 0786710527


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

SWEET POISON introduced Lord Edward Corinth, a bored, titled young man and Verity Browne, Communist, journalist, daughter of an extremely wealthy left wing attorney, and they solved a murder at Corinth's ancestral pile. In BONES OF THE BURIED, Edward went to Spain to help Verity free her lover from a spurious murder charge.

Now, it is the autumn of 1936, Verity is back in London recuperating from the horrors of the war in Spain and trying to write a book about the siege of Toledo, when she literally runs into Edward, as she is leaving the Galeries Lafayette with a pile of packages.

Press lord Joe Weaver, Verity's boss, asks Corinth to retrieve a stack of love letters that Mrs. Raymond Harkness, an old friend of Edward's stole from Wallis Simpson. Edward VIII is king but the coronation is still months away. "David" wants to marry Wallis but she is still married to Mr. Simpson. Joe asks Edward to ask Mrs., Harkness, a widow, to return the letters.

Corinth meets Wallis at a dinner party, and although she is not beautiful, she captivates him. He agrees to try and retrieve the letters. Edward VIII is violently anti-communist, but his quiet demeanor has even Verity fooled and she thinks he "has a feeling for ordinary people in distress". Wallis is a friend of the German ambassador, the former champagne salesman Joachim von Ribbentrop.

The murders are almost incidental. They are played out before the larger panoply of the Cable Street riots, the Jarrow March, and the plight of the innocent children caught up in the war in Spain.

Even though the series has the form of the traditional mystery, it is not just another pretty face dressed in designer clothing. It is a trenchant social history of a short period of time before the world exploded.

Reviewed by Barbara Franchi, July 2003

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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