Sight Unseen

October 16, 2006
This compelling stand-alone thriller from British author Goddard (Play to the End
) opens in 1981 with the kidnapping of two-year-old Tamsin Hall and the hit-and-run death of Tamsin's seven-year-old sister, Miranda, in the ancient town of Avebury, at the foot of two massive, mysterious monoliths, part of a Neolithic stone circle. Fast forward to the present, where historian David Umber, who witnessed the double crime and later married the children's nanny, hears from now retired Chief Inspector Sharp of the Wiltshire constabulary, who has received an anonymous letter with clues to what happened that center on the identity of an 18th-century political gadfly known by the pseudonym Junius, the subject of Umber's Ph.D. research. Umber's realization that his wife's suicide years before may actually have been murder spurs him to join Sharp in pursuing this new evidence. The solution to both the identity of Junius and the perpetrator of the crimes against the children is satisfying, intelligent and refreshingly straightforward.

November 15, 2006
Chief Inspector George Sharp never quite believed the serial pedophile who confessed to the 1981 murder of a seven-year-old girl and the abduction of her infant sister in eerie Avebury, England. (The ancient city is home to massive remnants of a neolithic stone circle that's both older and larger than the more famous Stonehenge.) Sharp, now retired, has his dormant skepticism revived some 20 years after the fact when he receives a mysterious letter "signed" by eighteenth-century polemicist Junius claiming, in no uncertain terms, that he nabbed the wrong man. Sharp is soon back in touch with David Umber, a Junius scholar and one of three witnesses on that fateful day. As it happened, the crime scene was also where David met his future wife, Sally, the nanny responsible for bringing the two girls--and their older brother--to the historic site. Sally was forever traumatized by the horrendous turn of events, and David remains haunted by her subsequent suicide--or might she have been murdered? Together and separately, David and Detective Sharp pursue a slew of shifty characters, creeping ever closer to the truth. International best-seller Goddard (" Bor"rowed Time, 2005) renders crisp prose and a crackling plot with plenty of ingenious twists. Recommend him to readers of Rendell and P. D. James.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2006, American Library Association.)