The Grenadillo Box

by JanetGleeson (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  2003

  $3.29

  It is New Year's Day 1755 and Nathaniel Hopson, journeyman to the famous cabinetmaker Thomas Chippendale, finds himself drawn into a chilling affair. While working at the country home of Lord Montfort, Nathaniel discovers his patron shot dead in his magnificent new library. The conclusion seems obvious: burdened with gambling debts and recently possessed of a melancholic nature, Montfort must have taken his own life, but Nathaniel is not convinced. While the gun near Montfort's hand suggests suicide, what of the blood on the windowsill and the confusion of footprints on the library floor? And there is another strange detail: the small, elaborately carved box of rare grenadillo wood clutched in the aristocrat's lifeless hand. No sooner has Nathaniel been set up as a most unlikely investigator than another body is found, frozen and cruelly mutilated. Nathaniel's detachment is shattered. He knows the victim well - but what was he doing on Montfort's country estate? Nathaniel's investigation will take him from palatial drawing rooms to the slums of Fleet Street and London's Foundling Hospital, where the identity of a child abandoned twenty years ago may hold the key to the mystery. But someone has already killed to keep this secret and each step Nathaniel takes on his journey is a step further into danger. As intricately crafted as a Chippendale cabinet, THE GRENADILLO BOX is both an utterly irresistible detective story and a vibrant recreation of eighteenth-century England, and marks the fiction debut of this supremely accomplished writer.

• Used

  Hardcover
  2002

  $3.29

  It all starts with a body in the library. When Lord Montford is discovered shot, sprawled on the floor of his newly completed library, his faithful hound dead at his feet, a mystery is uncovered, the answer to which has its origins thirty years in the past. Nathaniel Hopson, journeyman for Thomas Chippendale, the famous English furniture designer, and the man who built Montford's sumptuous library, is the first on the scene. Within hours another body is discovered, that of Nathaniel's closest friend John Partridge, his hands badly mutilated. How is it that a Lord of the realm and a cabinetmaker's assistant should both be found dead on the same night, both in suspicious circumstances? Nathaniel is set on a course as the reluctant detective, driven to discover the truth of his friend's mysterious death and his connection with the murder of Lord Montford. In The Grenadillo Box Janet Gleeson has produced a detective story as intricately crafted as a Chippendale cabinet, a gripping story which brings to dramatic life the world of the Eighteenth century.