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Sunday 16 October 2011

The Armada Boy by Kate Ellis

The Armada Boy by Kate Ellis

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Once again Kate Ellis got me enthralled in a wonderful storyline with wonderful characters.

Fifty years after D Day, a group of American veterans has returned to the small Devonshire town of Bereton where, in 1944, they prepared for Normandy, amazed the local children with gifts of candy and comics, and courted the local maidens. When one of the old soldiers, Norman Openheim, is found stabbed to death in the ruins of the same chapel where the GIs and the village girls once held their wartime trysts, Detective Sergeant Wesley Peterson finds his investigative attention torn between the past and the present. There is no shortage of suspects. Dorinda, Openheim's widow, is acting anything but bereaved in the company of tall, handsome Todd Weringer; a trio of post-adolescent urban urchins (Dog, Rat, and Snot) has been harassing the local merchants at knifepoint; and Norman's romance of 50 years ago produced a son with a criminal record and, just maybe, a lifetime of resentment built up against the father he never knew. More intriguing to Peterson and archaeologist Neil Watson are the parallels that exist between this murder and the murder of a sailor from the Spanish Armada in 1588. Hatred, jealousy, and revenge have cast 400-year-old shadows, and Peterson must untangle a skein of accusations, resentments, and family alliances that stretch back through the centuries. 

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