Marcus Attwater
Список книг автора Marcus AttwaterThe Secrets of Greystone House
When he was eleven years old, Jack Riley spent two golden months at Greystone House with Gwendolyn, Ian, Rory and Jamie. Seventeen years later his job as a newspaper reporter brings him back, to learn that it wasn't just the children who kept secrets that summer. Those days just before the war were not as idyllic as they seemed, and instead of writing about the discovery of an Iron Age treasure hoard, Riley finds himself reporting on a murder inquiry to which his own memories may hold the key.
Four Stories
"Apollo thumped the steering wheel in frustration. They were such a sorry excuse for a family. Playing at being human. Like Hermes, when they'd said goodbye: 'Come and see me'. They always said things like that. 'Come and visit', 'Let's have lunch', 'We'll keep in touch'. They never did. He had never seen Hermes' Manhattan apartment, and Hermes had never been to San Francisco. They would see each other only at funerals, if gods had funerals."
After several millennia, Apollo feels rather tired of featuring in the same myths over and over. So when Hera calls a family conference because his sister Helen has been kidnapped (or has run off with a man – interpretations differ on that) he is more interested in catching up with his favorite brother. Maybe this time around the story will be different?
These four stories transpose classical myth to an early twenty-first century setting, dealing with different kinds of brothers and different kinds of love: Apollo and Hermes, Castor and Pollux, Orestes and Pylades, Alexander and Hephaistion all encounter difficulties their old archetypes never had to worry about…
Serendipity
THE TELLER OFTEN TELLS THE TALE HE WANTS TO HEAR…
"Why, given its sad ending, did my not-quite-ancestor choose this particular story? I wonder whether he had noticed the same tendency as I have: how young men – specifically pairs of young men – from Greek myth go missing in modern accounts. There was a time when every hero was provided with a boyfriend as a matter of course, as all these respectable Englishmen with their classical educations knew full well. And yes, they usually died, for pathos was an integral part of this cult of the beautiful youth. And 'cult' is not too strong a word: there was a Roman emperor who turned his lost boy into a god, and you can go see his face in any half-decent museum of antiquities."
Hippasus is one of the lost boys of Greek myth, unknown even to most classicists. Inspired by the fortuitous discovery of an earlier attempt at reconstruction, the narrator embarks on a new examination of the evidence in the hope of rescuing from obscurity an appealing story of broken vows, mistaken identity, confusing oracles, young love— and a dragon.
St Oda's Bones
Three decades on, everyone who was there has long accepted their own version of events about the night Kester Johnson disappeared. But when an unexpected find lands the case on DI Collins' desk, those certainties start to crumble, and life in Abbey Hill suddenly becomes a lot less peaceful. Owen Collins has never been very good at keeping the personal and the professional separate, and even a murder from long ago can cause present-day complications. The first person he sees at the scene of the crime is his former lover. The mother of the victim appears to care less about the case than he does. His star witness is also the best friend of his boss. And then there is Jake, lost in a world of his own. With nothing to go on apart from what people choose to tell him, it looks like he may never unravel the mystery of St Oda's bones…
Ann & Frederick
A novella from the 'Histories of Claybrooke'. The lives of Ann, a maidservant, and Frederick, the son of an earl, should be entirely separate. But there are always cross-currents at work beneath the politesse of eighteenth-century society which link the different parts of 'the big house' – from the village children to visiting royalty – and which mean that from childhood to old age, their lives are inevitably entwined.
The Chapter of St Cloud
"Detective Inspector Collins stared at the whiteboard in his office. He hated the thing. It had photos of the murder victim stuck to it with little magnets, and his name in a big red circle in the centre. Other people had pictures of their family in the office. He had a boy in a blood-soaked T-shirt." Dominic Walsingham is researching the Chapter of St Cloud, a religious order his fellow historians have mostly left alone until now. That's probably because the order still exists, and its members don't take kindly to inquisitive medievalists. Dominic is beginning to think maybe he should leave well alone. Meanwhile, his colleague Claire is spending her holidays with her new in-laws. There are more of them than she can easily keep track of, and although they are very friendly, Claire doesn't really feel at ease. What are they hiding from her? Both decide they had better take their suspicions to the police, but between investigating a series of drug-related murders and keeping his handsome young informant out of trouble, DI Owen Collins really doesn't have time for academic speculation…
