Book description
The Chteau Letoric is the ancestral home of the highly respected Larche
family obsessed with the past, with bitterness, rancour and revenge.
Solange is one of France's most poignant Resistance heroines but, badly
tortured, now senile, the repository of many dark secrets, she has been
confined to a wheel chair since the end of the war. Her husband Henri
was accused of collaborating with the Nazis. Their son, Marius, at
forty-eight a senior officer in Interpol, has been fighting to clear his
father's name. But Marius himself is also vulnerable in St Esprit where
his past - a homosexual affair with a farm-worker - rises to plague him.
Suddenly the years of tongue-wagging culminate in the first of three
fatal tragedies: Henri Larche is murdered. The paralysis of a town
trapped in the past is powerfully evoked in this superbly skilful story
of a family whose dread secrets hound them to a death which has been
forty-five years coming. The Chteau Letoric is the ancestral home of
the highly respected Larche family obsessed with the past, with
bitterness, rancour and revenge. Solange is one of France's most
poignant Resistance heroines but, badly tortured, now senile, the
repository of many dark secrets, she has been confined to a wheel chair
since the end of the war. Her husband Henri was accused of collaborating
with the Nazis. Their son, Marius, at forty-eight a senior officer in
Interpol, has been fighting to clear his father's name. But Marius
himself is also vulnerable in St Esprit where his past - a homosexual
affair with a farm-worker - rises to plague him. Suddenly the years of
tongue-wagging culminate in the first of three fatal tragedies: Henri
Larche is murdered. The paralysis of a town trapped in the past is
powerfully evoked in this superbly skilful story of a family whose dread
secrets hound them to a death which has been forty-five years coming.
