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Touchstone

ebook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available
Hailed for her rich and powerful works of psychological suspense as well as her New York Times bestselling mysteries, Laurie R. King now takes us to a remote cottage in Cornwall where a gripping tale of intrigue, terrorism, and explosive passions begins with a visit to a recluse upon whom the fate of an entire nation may rest—a man code-named . . .

It’s eight years after the Great War shattered Bennett Grey’s life, leaving him with an excruciating sensitivity to the potential of human violence, and making social contact all but impossible. Once studied by British intelligence for his unique abilities, Grey has withdrawn from a rapidly changing world—until an American Bureau of Investigation agent comes to investigate for himself Grey’s potential as a weapon in a vicious new kind of warfare. Agent Harris Stuyvesant desperately needs Grey’s help entering a world where the rich and the radical exist side by side—a heady mix of the powerful and the celebrated, among whom lurks an enemy ready to strike a deadly blow at democracy on both sides of the Atlantic.
Here, among a titled family whose servants dress in whimsical costumes and whose daughter conducts an open affair with a man who wants to bring down the government, Stuyvesant finds himself dangerously seduced by one woman and—even more dangerously—falling in love with another. And as he sifts through secrets divulged and kept, he uncovers the target of a horrifying conspiracy, and wonders if he can trust his touchstone, Grey, to reveal the most dangerous player of all ….
Building to an astounding climax on an ancient English estate, Touchstone is both a harrowing thriller by a master of the genre and a thought-provoking exploration of the forces that drive history—and human destinies.
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    • Publisher's Weekly

      November 26, 2007
      Set shortly before Britain’s disastrous General Strike of 1926, this stand-alone thriller from bestseller King (Keeping Watch
      ) offers impeccable scholarship and the author’s usual intelligent prose, but a surfeit of period detail and some weighty themes—the gulf between rich and poor, the insidious nature of both terrorism and the efforts to curb it—overpower the thin plot and stock characters. When Harris Stuyvesant, an investigator for the U.S. Justice Department, arrives in London to look for the mastermind behind a series of terrorist bombings on American soil, he tells Aldous Carstairs, a sinister government official, that his prime suspect is Labour Party leader Richard Bunsen. Carstairs suggests Stuyvesant should talk to Bennett Grey, whose brush with death during WWI has heightened his sense of perception to the point that he’s a kind of human lie detector (he’s the “touchstone” of the title), and to Lady Laura Hurleigh, Bunsen’s lover and a passionate advocate of his brand of socialism. The threat of violence at a secret summit meeting held at the Hurleigh family’s country house about preventing the strike provides some mild suspense.

    • Library Journal

      Starred review from January 15, 2008
      With this new stand-alone, King once again departs from escapades of her series detectives Mary Russell ("The Game") and Kate Martinelli ("The Art of Detection") and returns to the exploration of postwar adjustment that was the focus of "Keeping Watch." Using the growth of the labor movement during the 1920s as a backdrop, she creates a community of characters whose motives and behaviors stem from their World War I experiences. At the center of the action is Cornwall resident Bennett Grey, a man with an uncanny ability to sense turmoil and deception within other individuals. Acquired after he sustained battle injuries, Grey's gift makes him an invaluable tool for F.B.I. agent Harris Stuyvesant, who is bent on tracking down the suspected British source of sophisticated incendiary devices used in more than one violent union confrontation on American soil, but it causes Grey both physical and mental distress. Realistic psychological drama, strong research, and impeccable writing style make this a tale not to be missed. Highly recommended.Nancy McNicol, Hamden P.L., CT

      Copyright 2008 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

    • Booklist

      Starred review from November 15, 2007
      In England in 1926, New Yorker Harris Stuyvesant is tracking the bomber who blew up his sweetheart and permanently injured his brother. A sinister operative leads him to Bennett Grey, whose injuries in World War I make him terrifyingly sensitive to every movement and gesture and who has hidden himself in Cornwall. These three, Greys former lover Lady Laura Hurleigh, and his sister, Sarah, form the points of an intricate star drawn around the old families and the coming general strike, the legacy of the war, and the desperation of poverty and class struggle. King works her mastery not only in a vivid and sometimes terrifying psychological study but also through gorgeous evocation of the English landscape, detaileddescription of the dynamics in a country house inhabited by the same family for half a millennium, and perceptive analysis of the intricate complexities of politics, power and gender, and social justice. Cinematic in the intensity of its shifting points of view and boasting characters so charismatic that we can hear not only their voices but also the sound of their breathing, Kings latest combines a compelling plot with a richly, even lushly, imagined time and place.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2007, American Library Association.)

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