The Vanished Child (Paperback)

She is in love with Harry Boulding, Reisden told himself, and engaged to Harry. I am in love with Tasy, who's dead. No, I was in love with Tasy, who died. He could not define what he felt for Perdita, only admit it. It was as though feeling was an island he had come to after a long voyage.

And suddenly he really does want to know what happened 18 years before and what the truth is; suddenly he has something at stake and it is not the Knight fortune. This first of Sarah Smith's much praised romantic thriller trilogy, The Vanished Child is a thrilling puzzle and a story of passionate emotions caught up in a clash of cultures; Reisden is the voice of a civilised Europe to whom these Americans' sense of propriety is mere barbarism. --Roz Kaveney

Review
Millionare William Knight was shot dead in 1887, in Boston Massachusetts. His eight-year-old grandson Richard witnessed the killing then, disappeared. Eighteen years later Baron Alexander Reisden, adopted son of Baron Franz von Reisden, is 'recognized' as Richard by Richard's personal doctor, Charles Knight. Reisden has no recollection of being Richard, feels sure he isn't and doesn't want to be. The familiy's succession is very complex and a greatdeal of money is at stake: Richard inherited millions. The only way Reisden can extricate himself from the situation is to prove that Richard is dead. When a detective working for the knights' lawyers approaches him and offers him that proof, Reisden feel there's no alternative but to work with him. But Richard's own heir, his uncle Gilbert, refuses to believe that Richard is dead, so proof of his death must be found before the fortune can be passed on. Is Reisden, against all odds, Richard? And what happens if he isn's and no body is found? And who killed William in the first place? If it sounds bewilderingly complicated - it is. The book calls for concerntration, but concerntration is well-paid. It is beautifully written, and along the way the author examines the callousness of turn-of-the-century upper-class behaviour: its sadistic cruelty to children - and the mysteries of amnesia, madness and unexpected love. A mind-boggling tangle of events, family relationships, convictions, delusions, stubborn hypotheses - all leading to a shocking outcome. Brilliant - not to be missed. (Kirkus UK)

Twenty years after someone killed William Knight and kidnapped William's eight-year-old grandson Richard, Baron Alexander von Reisden reluctantly agrees to impersonate Richard in order to solve the mystery of what happened back in 1887. Reisden, still mourning the death of his wife in a car he was driving, is lured away from his biological research when he's taken for Richard by Knight family physician Charles Adair, concerned bemuse Richard's uncle Gilbert, neurotically unwilling to declare Richard dead, is thereby preventing the family fortune from passing through him to his callow adopted son Harry, who's engaged to promising blind pianist Perdita Halley. But Reisden doesn't agree to pass himself off as Richard in order to jolt Gilbert into action; he merely enters Gilbert's household insisting he's not Richard and lets him think whatever he likes. As Reisden puzzles over the old mystery - was William really shot by his illegitimate son Jay French, as Charlie Adair testified, or was Charlie too far away to see who pulled the trigger? - and finds himself falling in love with Perdita, new mysteries multiply: Is the skeleton found in the barn evidence of Richard's murder, or of Jay's? Did Charlie really kill Jay himself? Is Reisden actually Richard after all? The news that William regularly beat his grandson paves the way for a solution to some of these riddles, but others are still floating unresolved at the final John Fowles-ish curtain. Smith (the computer-readable King of Space, plus academic nonfiction) paints a canvas reminiscent of Robert Goddard's well-upholstered period thrillers, though more tonily inconclusive at every stage. (Kirkus Reviews)

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