Beyond Recall

Marilyn Stasio

There's an elegant arc to Goddard's fluid style, which gracefully orchestrates the story over its broad time span and through the ambiguous testimony of its complex characters. -- New York Times Book Review

Thea Davis

The style is mournful, plaintive, and what some would call elegiac. The story moves slowly, but deliberately....The characters are well presented and well defined....If you are ready for a change of pace from fast moving, gritty archetypal suspense novels, and you enjoy history, then this is a book you will truly enjoy and remember.
—The Mystery Reader.com

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

As he does so smoothly and so well (Out of the Sun, etc.), Goddard again creates a narrator who uncovers secrets buried in the past that cast grim shadows on later generations. Here he takes classic English mystery staplesa grand old house in Cornwall, a family fortune in dispute, murder and blackmailand concocts an absorbing suspense novel with a modern sensibility. Alienated from his family for some years, Chris Napier returns home to the Cornish town of Truro for his niece's wedding at Tredower House, the family estate (now a hotel and conference center) bequeathed by his adventurous great uncle, Joshua Carnoweth. Guests are reminded of an unpleasant event when Chris's boyhood friend, Nicky Lanyon, shows up at the reception to announce that his father, who was hanged for the murder of Uncle Joshua, was innocent of the deed. Nicky culminates his plea by committing suicide. In Nicky's memory, Chris investigates the 34-year-old murder case, while one mysterious woman goes after his money and another wins his heart. Goddard intricately interweaves the life stories of three generations, adding texture to the parallel plots: the love between his great-uncle and Nicky's grandmother, the moral crises of the WWII generation and Chris's own tale of 1960s rebellion. As usual, Goddard is meticulous with background details and local color, and his characters, with their good manners and dark secrets, seem to have stepped out of a Daphne Du Maurier novel. There are enough surprises in this tale of switched identities and lingering resentments to keep readers steadily engrossed. (May)

Thea Davis

The style is mournful, plaintive, and what some would call elegiac. The story moves slowly, but deliberately....The characters are well presented and well defined....If you are ready for a change of pace from fast moving, gritty archetypal suspense novels, and you enjoy history, then this is a book you will truly enjoy and remember.
— The Mystery Reader.com

Washington Post Book World

This is successful crime fiction, but it's domestic drama as well, and, in its insistence on the ties that bind us to each other, very touching.

Kirkus Reviews

An unwelcome hint that the man who was executed long ago for the murder of Christian Napier's great-uncle brings back the past with a rush in Goddard's latest demi-period thriller (Out of the Sun, 1997, etc.). Everybody knows that Joshua Carnoweth, the Croesus of the Cornish town of Truro, was stabbed to death by ne'er-do-well Edmund Tully. Tully confessed to taking $500 to commit the crime back in 1947, showing the well-rehearsed remorse that earned him a life sentence that ended with his release in 1969. But Michael Lanyon—the son of the love Joshua left behind when he went off to make his fortune in the Klondike, the young man he'd brought up on his estate and regarded as his heir, and the man Tully insisted had hired him to kill the old man—was promptly hanged and the matter forgotten (or so it seems) until 1981, when Michael's son Nicky, Chris Napier's childhood friend, turns up at a family wedding to enlist Chris's help in clearing his father's name—only to hang himself that night. Stung by guilt and nagging suspicions of his family, and urged on by Nicky's long-lost sister Michaela, Chris toils to uncover the truth, which obligingly unrolls in Goddard's ceremonious periods ("The past is a room you only realize you've left when you hear the door close behind you"). Wading through thickets of well-groomed family skeletons, Chris finds two generations of lies and felonies devoted to covering up the truth practically nobody but him had truly forgotten before stumbling on Goddard's trademark malefactor: a survivor of the past determined to get revenge on Joshua's family, even (or especially) if it means impersonation, blackmail, arson, murder—whatever it takesto bring every family member to his or her trembling knees. The period trappings are generally kept to a seemly modicum, and the suspense mounts to a fine crescendo. A superior example of Goddard's velvet-cloaked menace.