A Dark Devotion - Softcover

Clare Francis is the author of the bestselling novels Night Sky, Red Crystal, and Wolf Winter as well as the nonfiction bestsellers Come Hell or High Water, Come Wind or Weather, and The Commanding Sea. A Dark Devotion is the third Clare Francis novel to be published by Soho, after Deceit and Betrayal. She lives in London.

In a tale as bleak as the wintry Norfolk marshes, lawyer Alex O'Neil is asked to solve the disappearance of a former love's wife. It turns out that Grace Dearden wasn't quite the paragon she'd appeared to be. Her body surfaces, along with ugly revelations of affairs and shady land deals. Devotion owes a lot to Rebecca and even more to Harriet Walter's expert reading. She ably delineates several characters/suspects but is unable to make them particularly likeable or sympathetic. The predictable conclusion lies in the marshes, but one gets quite bogged down in subplots getting there. J.B.G. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine