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Product Description
A young widow, Alice Aron arrives on a Mediterranean island with her two young sons to visit her husband's birthplace. The place is sun-drenched and barren, its people poor, subdued by corruption, longing for independence that will not come, regarding everyone with suspicion and resentment. This is no island paradise. Within hours Alice's seven year old, Sam has disappeared. No-one admits to knowing anything. The authorities are inert and impotent, except for the unpopular detective Antoine Stuart, whose main drive to find the child seems to be his obsessive desire to nail the criminal Coco Santini, a man who is a model of violence and intimidation but against whom there is not a shred of evidence. Rumours spread that The Movement, idealistic freedom fighters turned amoral racketeers, are responsible for the abduction; or maybe Italian gangsters. In a small place ruled by ancient enmities hiding a child can be dangerous. Someone will test a loyalty too far. Lost is a riveting, tense thriller peopled with unforgettable characters in a place that comes to life before us.
Amazon.com Review
Lucy Wadham's Corsica is a sunny Mediterranean island, true, but banish whatever images of Capri and Sardinia and Majorca that might pop into your head. Wadham's island is anything but glamorous--even bucolic seems a stretch. It is instead a latter-day Galapagos, where social Darwinians might find ample evidence of the harshness that governs the survival of the fittest. Windswept and corrupt, Corsica's bitter beauty can seduce--or trap.
Alice Aron has returned with her two young sons to the island, home of her late husband. She has always felt ill at ease here, and her powerlessness as an outsider is brought into brutal relief when her older son is kidnapped by a renegade member of the FNL, a Corsican independence movement languishing amidst apathy and greed. Mickey da Cruz is gambling for power against Coco Santini, aging head of the island's Mafia, and Alice and her sons are the chips he's willing to wager. Antoine Stuart, the detective assigned to the case, is jaded and cynical; he is also Coco's sworn enemy. But will the tension between Coco and Antoine (who has sworn to take down the Mafioso at any price) cloud the detective's judgment? With only 72 hours to find her son before he dies, Alice will find herself caught in a treacherous web of constantly shifting alliances and loyalties. Wadham's prose is spare and unsentimental, breathing life into an isolated community beset by external social pressures and internal political strife. Her characters, each with a seed of emptiness at his or her core, may not be comfortable to be around, but they make for superb reading. --Kelly Flynn
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