Name to a Face: A Centuries Old Mystery Is about To Unravel » (Original)

Robert Goddard's Into the Blue, was the winner of the first WHSmith Thumping Good Read Award. He lives in Truru, Cornwall. Delta will publish his next novel, Made To Be Broken, in 2010.

He’d seen her somewhere once—he was sure of that. But the young woman gave no hint of recognition and before this could be explained, everything fell apart. . . . Tim Harding has come to Cornwall at the behest of a friend to represent him in an auction and facilitate the purchase of a much-coveted antique ring. Hayley Winter has come there for reasons of her own . . . and a centuries-old mystery is about to come crashing down around them both.

A decade before, a woman matching Hayley’s exact description died in a suspicious diving accident—at the side of the man giving Harding his orders. Now the ring, said to have been cut off the finger of a drowned British naval commander in 1707, is at the center of a many-tendrilled puzzle. Uncanny resemblances . . . stunning contradictions . . . Then Hayley’s sudden disappearance . . . For Harding, one misstep and a handful of coincidences ignite a search through dozens of lives, back into English history and the age of the Black Death, and forward to a fatal meeting in Germany . . . to find Hayley, her true identity, and the most shocking secret of all.

Publishers Weekly

Tim Harding, the hero of this smoothly plotted novel of suspense from British author Goddard (Play to the End), makes an unlikely sleuth. The owner of a "middling garden maintenance and landscaping business" in Monaco, Harding agrees to travel to Penzance in west Cornwall to help Barney Tozer, his wealthy friend and client. Tozer wants Harding to purchase on his behalf an antique ring that will be in the estate sale of Tozer's late eccentric uncle. In Cornwall, Harding becomes involved with Hayley Winter, an enigmatic young housekeeper who resembles a reporter who drowned 10 years earlier while scuba diving with Tozer. After the ring is stolen and Hayley disappears, Harding's search-into Tozer's odd past, a family superstition and English history-is hampered because everyone lies or hides his or her past. Goddard's gentle pacing and even prose build to an absorbing finale. (June)

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