The Shadow of Memory

Connie Berry
Works of: Fiction

As Kate Hamilton contemplates her future with Detective Inspector Tom Mallory, she is also helping her colleague Ivor Tweedy organize an upcoming auction in a seaside village on the Suffolk coast. Netherfield Sanatorium, an abandoned Victorian insane asylum, is being converted into luxury townhouses, and Kate and Ivor have been asked to auction off a fine collection of antiques, including a fifteenth-century painting attributed to the Dutch master Jan Van Eyck. But when retired criminal inspector Will Parker is found dead, Kate discovers that the halls of the sanatorium housed much more than priceless art.

Kate is surprised to learn that Will Parker was her friend Vivian Bunn’s first boyfriend. They met in 1963 at a seaside holiday camp when, along with three other teens, they explored an abandoned house where two years earlier a local doctor and his wife had died under bizarre circumstances. Now, when a second member of the childhood gang dies unexpectedly—and then a third—it becomes clear the teens discovered more in the house than they realized.

What was the deadly truth they unwittingly found? When Kate makes a shocking connection between a sixty-year-old murder and the long-buried secrets of the sanatorium, she understands that time is running out for Vivian—and anyone connected to her.