The American Boy
The American Boy
Author: Andrew Taylor
Desc: Interweaving real and fictional elements The American Boy is a major new literary historical crime novel in the tradition of An Instance of the Fingerpost and Possession. England 1819: Thomas Shield a new master at a school just outside London is tutor to a young American boy and the boy's sensitive best friend Charles Frant. Drawn to Frant's beautiful unhappy mother Thomas becomes caught up in her family's twisted intrigues. Then a brutal crime is committed with consequences that threaten to destroy Thomas and all that he has come to hold dear. Despite his efforts Shield is caught up in a deadly tangle of sex money murder and lies -- a tangle that grips him tighter even as he tries to escape from it. And what of the strange American child at the heart of these macabre events yet mysterious -- what is the secret of the boy named Edgar Allen Poe?