Andrew Taylor

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BOOKS BY THIS AUTHOR


Title: The American Boy: Description:
England 1819: Thomas Shield, a new master at a school just outside London, is tutor to a young American boy and the boys sensitive best friend, Charles Frant. Drawn to Frant's beautiful unhappy mother, Thomas becomes caught up in her family's twisted intrigues.

Title: The Invader: Description:
Thriller

Title: Stain On The Silence: Description:
You can run from a guilty conscience, but you can't hide...James wasn't much more than a child when he had an affair with Lily. And now, twenty-four years later, Lily confesses to James that their affair led to a daughter, Kate. And Kate desperately needs her father's help: she's wanted for murder. But there is no room for murder in James' life. He has a wife, a good job, a nice house in the country...As Kate comes crashing into his world, so she lights the fuse under his ordered life. Because James has also been keeping a secret - a very dark and deadly one... From the Author During the last ten years I have sometimes felt that as a crime novelist I have been lurching steadily forwards with my eyes looking backwards over my shoulder. From the middle of the 1990s, after The Four Last Things, all my novels have been set in the past, mainly in the 1950s. The American Boy was set in the early nineteenth century. Steadily the urge grew on me to write a book about a place that had not existed when I wrote The Four Last Things – this brave new world of ours where mobiles chatter and trill like birds, CCTV cameras perch on every corner, and people go googling on svelte laptops that no longer need to be attached to the rest of the world with wires. Out of this came A Stain on the Silence. The novel starts from three very simple premises: what if a childless man in his forties discovers that he has a daughter, the result of an affair 25 years earlier? What if the daughter is pregnant? And what if she’s on the run for murder? But though the setting is contemporary, the themes and dilemmas of the novel are as universal as love and death. It’s a book about children and parents, and especially about missing children – children who are lost; children who are stolen, children who lose themselves, and children who haunt the minds of those who do not have them. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. About the Author Since 1981, I have been a full-time writer. I write mainly crime novels and thrillers. They include the series featuring William Dougal, a detective of low moral fibre who occasionally commits murders as well as solves them; the ROTH TRILOGY, the LYDMOUTH SERIES and THE AMERICAN BOY, a historical novel set in early nineteenth-century England which revolves round the boyhood of Edgar Allan Poe. CAROLINE MINUSCULE won the John Creasey Memorial Award from the Crime Writers' Association and an Edgar Scroll from the Mystery Writers of America. OUR FATHERS' LIES was shortlisted for the CWA's Gold Dagger. The teenage thriller SNAPSHOT was shortlisted for the NatWest Children's Book of the Year Award. THE OFFICE OF THE DEAD won the CWA's Ellis Peters Historical Dagger in 2001; and THE AMERICAN BOY won the same award in 2003. (I am the only author to have won this award twice.) I have also been shortlisted three times for Sweden's Martin Beck Award. (This reminds me of the saying "Always the bridesmaid...") THE AMERICAN BOY was a Richard and Judy book club selection in 2005. The audio version of the American edition (An Unpardonable Crime), read by Sir Derek Jacobi, won the Audie award in the Literary Fiction category. For more information see andrew-taylor.co.uk. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. Excerpted from A Stain on the Silence by Andrew Taylor. Copyright © 2006. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. PROLOGUE"Are you sure it’s here?" the sergeant says. "Yes." I watch the other man picking his way among the saplings and the stones. "There used to be one further up, but that fell down long before I came here."The other man drags away a fallen branch and swears as a bramble sucker rakes its thorns across the back of his hand. He works the blade of the spade under a corner of one of the stones. The stone has been roughly squared. I think it tapers slightly so perhaps it came from the vault or even from the arch over the entrance. He tries to lever it up but it’s too deeply bedded into the tangled roots and impacted rubble. They won’t get far with a single spade. They really need a mechanical digger.The sergeant cocks an eyebrow at me. He’s at least ten younger than I am but, like so many policemen, he believes himself centuries older in the ways of the world."Listen, sir," he say. "When it comes down to it, we haven’t got a great deal to go on. And it’s hell of a long time ago.""You’ve got the fish necklace.""Which you have to agree is a long way from conclusive. There’s no way of telling if it’s the same one."Blood near the gate, I think, and the sound of thunder on a fine day? Doesn’t that count for anything? "We can’t even be sure where it was found. Particularly as one witness is no longer with us, and the other was a kid when it turned up. And why here exactly?" he goes on. "It’s a big place. Could have been anywhere, surely?""Because this was special," I say, as I’ve said many times before to this man and to his colleagues. "This was a secret.""If we find nothing, it’s not going to make things look any better. Have you thought of that? And even if we do find something, it’s –"I sigh. "Nothing’s going to make things look better.""No one likes time-wasters, you know.""I’m trying to help you. That’s why you brought me here. Haven’t you got a metal detector in the van? That might save time."He doesn’t like my telling him what to do. "If you’re right, there’s a hell of a lot of earth and stone on top. Even if there is something worth finding down there, we won’t get a peep out of it."The sergeant lights a cigarette – a Marlboro Light, as it happens – and turns away to stare down the slope at the stream. He gets out his phone and moves further away from me. Wood pigeons coo. There are bluebells in the green shade on the opposite bank of the stream. Bluebells mean constancy, Felicity said. Everlasting love. And I hear her voice saying, "I suppose I could always marry you if I had to marry someone." A few minutes later, a detective constable appears on the path, carrying the metal detector on her shoulder. I watch the three police officers consult in a huddle among the ruins. The sergeant glances at me. The woman turns on the metal detector. They have the sense to use it near the edge of the stones, where there is almost certainly a thinner layer of debris above the former ground level. Less than a minute later they have a very sharp signal. The man with the spade comes over. He digs, and the other two try to help by pulling branches and stones out of his way. It’s a warm afternoon and it’s getting hotter in this little valley, despite the trees and the stream. The air isn’t moving."I can see something, Sarge," the woman says, crouching. Her fingers scrabble among the stones. "I think it’s a wheel off a bike."A BMX bike. My phone rings. I take it out of my pocket and move away from the sergeant. I know he’s watching me. I glance at the caller display and press one of the keys."Jamie," the voice says. "Jamie, it’s me." --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Title: The Mortal Sickness (a Lydmouth Mystery): Description:
When a spinster of the parish is found bludgeoned to death in St John's, and the church's most valuable possession, the Lydmouth chalice, is missing, the finger of suspicion points at the new vicar, who is already beset with problems. The glare of the police investigation reveals shabby secrets and private griefs. Jill Francis, struggling to find her feet in her new life, stumbles into the case at the beginning. But even a journalist cannot always watch from the sidelines. Soon she is inextricably involved in the Suttons' affairs. Despite the electric antagonism between her and Inspector Richard Thornhill, she has instincts that she can't ignore ... About the Author Andrew Taylor has worked as a boatbuilder, wages clerk, librarian, labourer and publisher's reader. He has written many crime novels as well as children's books and lives with his wife and their two children in the Forest of Dean, on the borders of England and Wales.

Title: Death's Own Door (the Lydmouth Series): Description:
When the body of Rufus Moorcroft, a middle-aged widower with a distinguished war record, is found in his summerhouse, the verdict is suicide. But both reporter Jill Francis and her lover, Detective Richard Thornhill, approaching the case from different angles, discover there's more to it than that. The key to the mystery stetches back to a highly-charged summer before the war, and back to another death. A local asylum plays a part, as do a moderately famous artist and his wife; Superintendent Williamson, now retired and loathing it; Councillor Bernie Broadbent - a man with more pies than fingers to put in them; a Cambridge don; an aristocratic unmarried mother, now gleefully drawing her old-age pension; and - to Thornhill's surprise and growing horror - his own wife, Edith. About the Author Andrew Taylor has worked as a boatbuilder, wages clerk, librarian, labourer and publisher's reader. He has written many crime novels as well as children's books and lives with his wife and their two children in the Forest of Dean, on the borders of England and Wales. Excerpted from Death's Own Door by Andrew Taylor. Copyright © 2002. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Edith did not listen to the words he was saying. For all she knew or cared he might have been reading the weather forecast. She heard his voice, though deeper and firmer than it had been. The rest of the service flowed around her as if it were a stream and she were a rock in the middle of it: and in time the softest water wore down the hardest stone. Jack Graig can't be here. His uncle had died only a week ago. He couldn't have come back to England in that time, surely? And Rufus Moorcroft had only been an uncle, not a father. They wouldn't have sent him home on compassionate leave for an uncle. She felt angry while she stood, knelt, sat, sang and prayed angry with herself for giving way to a sentimental impulse, angry with fate, and most of all angry with Jack Graig for having the gall to turn up after all these years. The mourners followed the coffin and the priest into the sun-filled churchyard. Edith had wondered whether they would allow Rufus Moorcroft to lie here. She and Randolph Haughton fell in at the end of the procession which wound between the gravestones to a part of the churchyard near the northern boundary. There were few headstones here, and a pair of trees, a whitebeam and a yew, created a partial screen. Perhaps this was where they put people like Rufus Moorcroft. She kept on the fringe of the crowd around the open grave, making sure that she was behind Jack Graig. Probably he wouldn't know her from Adam or, rather, from Eve, but she did not want to put it to the test. She recognised the perpetually frowning features of old George Shipston, the senior partner of the solicitors' firm in Castle Street. Another familiar face belonged to a middle-aged woman in a squashed felt hat.`Morning, Mrs Thornhill,' said a man's voice at her shoulder.Startled, she turned her head. `Brian.'Detective Sergeant Kirby smiled at her and raised his hat, a new bowler which had left a welt across his forehead. He wore a dark suit with padded shoulders which made him look broader than he was, almost like a spiv. The gay green pattern of his tie clashed with the green silk handkerchief peeping from the breast pocket of his jacket. He was bursting with colour and energy, like an exploding firework.`Just keeping a watching brief,' he said. `Not the only one, either.' He had a Londoner's voice, perhaps a generation removed from pure cockney. His eyes flicked away from her, and she followed his gaze to a plump, elderly man trying half-heartedly to suppress a phlegmy cough on the other side of the grave. `Know who that is? Ivor Fuggle, works for the Post.' Kirby murmured the words in such a low voice that only she could hear him. He smiled and nodded, as though they were casual acquaintances, and moved a yard or two away. Edith had been a policeman's wife for long enough to know exactly what he had been saying, both with and without words.