Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published Mar 2011
432 pages
Genre: Thrillers
Publication Information
Summer, 1944. After almost five years of conflict, London's inhabitants are exhausted. War-weary DI Ted Stratton is no exception, but he cannot help being drawn in by his latest case. Called on to investigate when a doctor is found dead in Fitzrovia's Middlesex Hospital, Stratton soon realizes that someone involved is not who they appear to be. Someone has discarded their own identity, and that someone is on a killing spree.
Meanwhile Jenny, Ted's wife, who is working at the local recovery center, is also running on fumes. When a bombed-out woman shows up, declaring that the man claiming to be her husband is an imposter, Jenny blames the woman’s confusion on shock. The reality, however, is much stranger and far more dangerous...
Ultimately, for both Stratton and Jenny perhaps there is only one thing they can really trust: their fear. And for one of them, that fear may prove to be all too real. An Empty Death is a thoroughly riveting thriller.
"[A] heart-wrenching, life-and-death drama involving Stratton's wife and culminates in an unexpected plot twist." - Kirkus
"[An] over-the-top ending vitiates almost all the emotional force of the novel's opening." - Publishers Weekly
"Starred Review. Fans of the moody historical mysteries by Charles Todd and Rennie Airth will enjoy discovering a new author." - Library Journal
"...all the strands are meticulously handled, and different readers will find different threads that they feel are most compelling." - Booklist
This information about An Empty Death was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
The British author Laura Wilson was brought up in London and has degrees in English literature from Somerville College, Oxford, and UCL, London. She lives in Islington, London, where she is currently working on her twelfth novel. She is the crime fiction reviewer for the Guardian newspaper and teaches on the City University Crime Thriller Novel Creative Writing MA course.
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