A spell-casting novel reminiscent of Brideshead Revisited, Grace and Favor (originally published by St. Martin’s Press in 1997) tells a tale of merchant banking scandals, family secrets and murder, set in the surprisingly still-enchanted world of England’s landed gentry.
John Brook, a contemporary, all but reluctant American expatriate, believes it is fate that has taken him from Washington to London. When he awakens to find his English wife Julia missing from their bed on the eve of a shooting weekend, he sets off in search of her through her family’s stately home. The conversation he overhears, soon magnified by Julia’s refusal to acknowledge it, is but the first in a series of ever more ominous events – wheels within wheels of intrigue, pitting a love of land against a lust for money – that threaten the couple’s future, their children, and their lives.
The hidden treacheries that underlie the novel’s beguiling, aristocratic, end-of-the-twentieth-century milieu will remind readers that, many generations on, such venues as Downton Abbey still remain suspended between history and possibility as they continue to shape the consciousness and destiny of their modern inhabitants.
“They don’t write them like this anymore. Grace and Favor is like a Battersea box: highly polished inside and out with surprises inside.” – Christopher Buckley, author of The Relic Master.
“A wry, sly look at trans-Atlantic mores through the eyes of a shrewd, observant, mid-Atlantic man. A most diverting read.” – Robert Stone, author of Dog Soldiers.
