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Product Description
Political intrigue in Graham Greene territory snares a young widow on a Mediterranean island in a taut thriller by a deft new literary talent. The plane is late; a small-time hood named Mickey da Cruz is getting edgy. From the outset of this splendidly crafted novel of suspense, suspicion hangs heavily in the air, and page by gripping page, terror insidiously tightens its hold. Just as Carroll & Graf's widely acclaimed literary thriller Lying With the Enemy uncovered the horror at the heart of a Nazi-occupied island in the English Channel, Lucy Wadham in her debut novel bares the corrupt soul of a barren, sun-drenched Mediterranean island rent by ancient enmities. Italian gangsters haunt its alleys, and The Movement - a cadre of idealistic freedom fighters - has declined into a band of racketeers. The people, meanwhile, suffer poverty and political oppression as they long without hope for independence. This island is no paradise. Alice Aron knows this morally desolate place. Now widowed, she returns to her dead husband's home with her two young sons. She does not know the perils that await her there. She does not know that she will be thrust into the center of a deadly conflict between a driven police detective, Antoine Stuart, and the criminally ruthless power-monger Coco Santini. She does not know that within hours her seven-year-old son will vanish into the midday air from the middle of the village square. A child's life hangs in the balance, and a woman's destiny is profoundly altered as the unexpected and unpredictable events unravel in this craftily wrought, tersely told, and thoroughly compelling novel.
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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