Guest Blogger: Gillean Somerville -Arjat: Book Review: The Silent Boy by Andrew Taylor, Andrew Taylor?
Like Dickens, Andrew Taylor distils his
fascination with crime into thoroughly satisfying fiction. His historical
research is impeccable, his suspense gently drip-fed, chilling horrors
suggested, cliff-hangers keep you guessing and then he upends all your
expectations.
The Silent Boy is an
absorbing sequel to his epic Scent of
Death, which was set in turbulent Manhattan during the American War of
Independence, and shares the same central protagonist, Edward Savill.
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It is now 1792 and in Paris the Reign of Terror is underway. The novel opens with a ten-year-old boy called Charles, his shirt stained with blood, fleeing for his life through the streets while a mob storms the Tuileries,
but whatever he does he must not speak. Later, marooned in an English country house with three other French refugees, a count, a bishop and a doctor, he silently awaits his fate. His mother was Edward Savill’s estranged, unfaithful wife, now dead in Paris. Savill sets out to claim him as his son, but he has two powerful rivals with reason to believe they are the boy’s actual father. Charles wants to go his own way, into the wild, surviving like Robinson Crusoe, his one companion the doctor’s écorché, a horrific anatomical aid, representing a young boy, made from a plaster cast of the flayed body of a
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The Silent BoyAvailable on amazon kindle £7.47 PB £6.39
The Scent of Death available on amazon kindle £1.49, PB £6.74
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