Tangled Web UK Review March 2009
Dark Echo by
F G Cottam
hbk out November 08
Published by Hodder
at £17.99
Once more, hardly a crime book, though almost at the end some multiple murders are revealed. It is really a ghost story, with unalloyed supernatural events being the main plank of the plot.
A rich businessman, Magnus Stannard, sells up in middle age and achieves his life’s ambition by buying an old sailing boat, the ‘Dark Echo’, which he first saw in a photograph in a childhood book. The hundred-foot racer had belonged to Harry Spalding, a rich American playboy with a bad reputation, in the nineteen twenties, but had always been deemed an unlucky ship and had mouldered away in a boatyard until Stannard paid over the odds for it. He persuades his son Martin to go with him on a trip across the Atlantic after the boat had been renovated at vast expense. All sort of mysterious accidents occur during the re-fit and the tale gets spookier and more evil-laden as it goes on. Martin’s fiance, Suzanne, tries to dissuade him from going and when she fails, begins some research into Harry Spalding and the cursed craft. The two men set out on their voyage, which ends in a bizarre disaster on the Lancashire coast.
A good tale to read alone on a stormy night when the lights have failed!
(
Bernard Knight
ex Home Office Pathologist and author of the highly acclaimed Crowner John series)
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