10-lb PenaltyAt 18, easy going Benedict Juliard and his father enter into a pact that neither of them will commit any act that could destroy the father's career. Ten years later he is targetted in a vicious attack mounted by his father's increasingly violent political enemies.

and keep her idiot-savant lover

On the bleak island of Ray

confidence artist and trickster

There is evidence of atraitor in their midst

and with its sinister murder room celebrating notorious crimes committed in the interwar years

with the victim pierced by an arrow and holding a card of "Death and the Arrow"

it seems that his whole life has been leading up to an agonizing and crucial failure of nerve

The worst crime of all insulting a grown-up

And then he finds the corpse of a child beside an ancient river

and the British left

and must live with the moral consequences of his actions

addictive and utterly compelling