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Product Description
Product 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's 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.
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First Sentence
Jamie. Read the first page Browse Sample Pages
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
Jamie. Read the first page Browse Sample Pages
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
James is called to visit Lily, a long-lost "friend" who is dying, only to be told that their earlier relationship (he as a juvenile and she as an older married woman) produced a child he didn't know about. That child now needs help because she fears she is wanted for murder. It is a complication in James' life he doesn't need, as he is happily married etc., but Lily induces his co-operation because he too has a dark secret only Lily knows about.
Taylor weaves a very interesting tale, offering clues in installments, as James shuffles between protecting Kate today and recalling the circumstances of his infatuation and relationship with Lily. Taylor is very clever in his use of the drip-feed, closing chapters with bombshells and using the next chapter to take us to the other time zone - this formula compelling us to keep ploughing on!
The novel is well-written, has some good lines and has great ingredients for an absorbing plot.
Why then spoil it all with such an unsatisfactory close? Taylor could really have done better than produce such a hurried finish which I clearly won't give away here.
I will still look out for more of his books in the hope that the "failing" here, in an otherwise excellent read, is a one-off. 7/10
Taylor weaves a very interesting tale, offering clues in installments, as James shuffles between protecting Kate today and recalling the circumstances of his infatuation and relationship with Lily. Taylor is very clever in his use of the drip-feed, closing chapters with bombshells and using the next chapter to take us to the other time zone - this formula compelling us to keep ploughing on!
The novel is well-written, has some good lines and has great ingredients for an absorbing plot.
Why then spoil it all with such an unsatisfactory close? Taylor could really have done better than produce such a hurried finish which I clearly won't give away here.
I will still look out for more of his books in the hope that the "failing" here, in an otherwise excellent read, is a one-off. 7/10
10 of 12 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I bought this book on the strength of a previous Andrew Taylor book - The American Boy - which I thoroughly enjoyed. Great characters, very atmospheric, fully of suspense and anticipation.
However for me this story just didn't really get going. The characters seemed one dimensional so it's difficult to understand the motives behind their behaviour and therefore to make real sense of the story as it unfolds. The main male character James just seemed like an absolute wet weekend. If like Kate, I found out he was my father, I'd be running in the opposite direction like a dose of sauce. He seemed to be completely without any kind of backbone and had no understanding of how to manage relationships with women.
Carlo on the other hand had the potential to be an really exciting character - real charm and menace is hinted at but never really explored in any kind of satifactory way which is such a shame.
I have to say I was suprised to read the plaudits on the book jacket from the Daily Telegraph, Time-Out and The Times. They implied this was a page turner from one of Britain's best writers of psychological suspense but for me it just doesn't live up to their claims - hence the title of my review.
However for me this story just didn't really get going. The characters seemed one dimensional so it's difficult to understand the motives behind their behaviour and therefore to make real sense of the story as it unfolds. The main male character James just seemed like an absolute wet weekend. If like Kate, I found out he was my father, I'd be running in the opposite direction like a dose of sauce. He seemed to be completely without any kind of backbone and had no understanding of how to manage relationships with women.
Carlo on the other hand had the potential to be an really exciting character - real charm and menace is hinted at but never really explored in any kind of satifactory way which is such a shame.
I have to say I was suprised to read the plaudits on the book jacket from the Daily Telegraph, Time-Out and The Times. They implied this was a page turner from one of Britain's best writers of psychological suspense but for me it just doesn't live up to their claims - hence the title of my review.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Curiously enough, this feels much more like one of Robert Goddard's books: its hero Jamie is much very like one of Goddard's lame, bewildered, middle-aged, male anti-heros, who do inexplicable and obviously stupid and unlikely things, surrounded by people who are sharper, cleverer and more cunning than they are. It is still readable, but not nearly as good as Taylor at his best, and it's without the twists and turns that make Goddard still very readable despite the above. And then it just stops, unsatisfactorily, as though he couldn't work out how to end it.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
Blood near the gate and the sound of thunder on a fine day
James is a man with a lot of secrets in his past, and then one of them turns up on his doorstep. He is happily married to Nicky, who unfortunately can't have children; the girl,... Read more
Published 21 months ago by Eileen Shaw
Really average
I decided to read Taylor, an author I knew nothing about, after I saw him on the one show and saw that he had been awarded a diamond dagger prize for a lifetime's achievement. Read more
Published on 28 July 2009 by H. Lacroix
Wild oats that bite back.....
This is a good pschological thriller - Andrew Taylor writes well and the style he uses in this book gradually drip feeds you the back story as the present conflict unfolds and this... Read more
Published on 1 Oct 2007 by George Stringer
Must read
This book is very different to Taylor's fascinating historical novel the American Boy, yet his absorbing style remains. A fantastic read.
Published on 14 Jun 2007 by J. Michael
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