We all make mistakes. Moments that change us and the path we are on irrevocably. For Rachel Allen it was the moment that she let her son's hand slip from hers. For Danny Simpson and Graham Harris it was the moment one of them took it. Seven years ago Danny and Graham were just children themselves, angry, marginalized and unguided. That was, until they committed a crime so heinous that three families were left devastated. They were no longer just boys. They were monsters. Released from juvenile detention, it is time for the boys, now men, to start again; new names, new people. But they can never escape who they are or what they did. And their own families, now notorious; the Allens, destroyed with grief; and the country at large have never been able to forget. They will always be running. They will always be hiding. But are some mistakes too large, the ripples to far reaching, to outrun forever?
Not betrothed, but beguiled In artistic circles she is the Divine Dita, Paris's most sought-after nude model. But now she's not so much posing as playing a role: fiancée to the next earl of Athal. The charade is a favor to Dita's friend, Eddie Jago, a dissolute painter…and the aforementioned heir. As deceptions go, it is innocent compared to what will come. On the grim Cornish coast, from the ashes of a ruined castle rises the Jagos' sumptuous new manor house. The fresh-hewn stone, however, cannot absorb the blood of centuries or quiet the echoes of past crimes. Dita struggles to decipher the family: the infirm earl and his inscrutable wife; resentful Eddie; sheltered sister Eleanor. And Cad: the handsome second son whose reputation is spotless in business—scandalous everywhere else. Drawn by friendship, ensnared by lust, Dita uncovers a sordid tangle of murder, desire and madness. It will lay her bare as no portraitist has done before.
This Paradise community doesn't seem to me to be the secure, feudal, friendly affair that everybody likes to think. There's a change working . . .' As the turbulent island of St. Jago reaches a turning point in its way of life Janet and Twice Alexander are once again deeply involved in the daily life of the community. Many loved Friends reappear and now added to these are the gentle Mrs Miller from Achcraggan, a link with Janet's childhood; the widowed Mrs Miller in the toils of a mixed marriage, and coloured Mrs Miller who becomes Twice's secretary. When a double crisis occurs in her personal fortunes, Janet finds a new maturity.
A young woman turns up dead on the streets of Viriconium but before Dai Llewellyn can investigate he first has to prove it is actually a murder. Join Dai and Julia as danger stalks their steps in an alternative modern day Britain where the Roman Empire still rules.
She was very small with fragile birdlike bones, and although she had slept in the white shirt and shorts she still looked fresh and airy, as if she had just flown in from the open sky . . . ' When Janet Sandison returns to her Caribbean home from a holiday in Scotland she finds her husband Twice Alexander wonderfully restored to his old self, full of hope for the future and no longer haunted by the illness which had shadowed their lives for several years. Sir Ian has made him Manager of the Paradise sugar mills, with gawky young Mackie as his assistant; but Janet senses that almost the main contribution to his recovery is the arrival on the island of a girl who is keeping house for a team of young social workers, whom the island has nicknamed the 'Teeth and Feet people'. For Twice this is the daughter he has never had, but for Janet the relationship is more complicated. The girl has flown into Janet's house and Twice's heart but seems somehow always ready to take wing again, like the swallows of Janet's beloved childhood home, Reachfar. This is a wise story of ends and beginnings, for the lives of not only Janet and her husband but of all their friends in St Jago and in Scotland are moving on, changing and developing in a way which holds sadness and fortitude, gaiety and love, all woven together with that mixture of humour, hard sense and understanding which make Jane Duncan's novels such engrossing reading.
From the rail I looked down at Sashie's upturned face and the brilliant, early tropical sunlight made me think of the lights upon the stage of a theatre long ago . . .' With these thoughts Janet Sandison says goodbye to the West Indian island that has been her home for many years, for her husband Twice has died, the great house where old Madame Dulac held court for so long is to be sold, changes are coming to the island, and Janet herself is setting out on a new and adventurous life. That she is doing so is due in no small measure to her friend Sashie, the ex-RAF pilot who walks on 'tin legs' and whose tender, sensitive friendship has drawn Janet from the dark limbo of desolation into which her husband's death had plunged her. The flamboyant Sashie is a brilliant and subtle character, as readers of Jane Duncan's previous 'Friends' books know; and in this story of Janet's move to a new life he is revealed with all the perception and clear-sightedness that make Jane Duncan so compelling a story-teller.
Jane Roberts, author of Seth speaks and other works on the nature of consciousness, is interviewed over the telephone from her home in Elmira, N.Y., for a radio program aired on KNBR, San Francisco.
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