On a sunny afternoon in late June, Cambridge professor Joseph Reavley is summoned from a student cricket match to learn that his parents have died in an automobile crash. Joseph's brother, Matthew, an officer in the Intelligence Service, reveals that their father had been en route to London to turn over to him a mysterious secret document--allegedly with the power to disgrace England forever and destroy the civilized world. A paper so damning that Joseph and Matthew dared mention it only to their restless sister. Now it has ...
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On a sunny afternoon in late June, Cambridge professor Joseph Reavley is summoned from a student cricket match to learn that his parents have died in an automobile crash. Joseph's brother, Matthew, an officer in the Intelligence Service, reveals that their father had been en route to London to turn over to him a mysterious secret document--allegedly with the power to disgrace England forever and destroy the civilized world. A paper so damning that Joseph and Matthew dared mention it only to their restless sister. Now it has vanished. What has happened to this explosive document, if indeed it ever existed? How had it fallen into the hands of their father, a quiet countryman? Not even Matthew, with his Intelligence connections, can answer these questions. And Joseph is soon burdened with a second tragedy: the shocking murder of his most gifted student, handsome Sebastian Allard, loved and admired by everyone. Or so it appeared. Meanwhile, England's seamless peace is cracking--as the distance between the murder of an Austrian archduke by a Serbian anarchist and the death of a brilliant university student by a bullet to the head becomes shorter with each day.
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Anne Perry is renowned for her Victorian murder mysteries. Here she moves into the Edwardian era and the start of WW1.
Not always fast-moving and a bit too much explanation of the thinking of each individual for my liking. Sounds a little bit patronising.
Some technical inaccuracies -- e.g. in this volume people are described as getting into their cars and then starting them -- which they couldn't do in 1914 as the electric self-starter hadn't been invented and other forms of self-starter hadn't been fitted to the makes referred to. Obviously she's picked up on that particular point because later in the series that's been corrected.
