Andrew Taylor — The American Boy

Harper Perennial 2013 Paperback, 485pp. England 1819: Thomas Shield, a new master at a school just outside London, is tutor to a young American boy and the child’s sensitive best friend, Charles Frant. Helplessly drawn to Frant’s beautiful, unhappy mother, Thomas becomes entwined in their family’s affairs. When a brutal murder takes place in London’s seedy backstreets, it is not certain who either the victim or the killer is. But all clues seem to lead back to the Frant household, and Shield is tangled in a web of lies, money, sex and death that threatens to tear his new life apart. And what of the strange American child at the heart of these macabre events – what is the dark secret of the boy named Edgar Allan Poe? Cover creased. (ISBN: 9780007109609). Good.