The Mystery Writer — Jessica Mann

It is 1940, and the world is at war. Britain is evacuating its children, to keep them 'out of harms way' and Ted Johns, son of the groundskeeper at the manor house in Goonzoyle finds himself in steerage aboard the evacuees' ship, SS City of Benares. In the first class cabins is the heir to Goonzoyle, Jonathan Hicks, but when the ship is torpedoed, the boys find themselves thrown together, clinging to the wreckage of a life raft. Many lives are lost that night, but one of the boys survives and begins a new life in California, returning to Cornwall after the death of his father, in 1951. Now in 2003, Jessica Mann is researching her new book Out of Harm's Way, the story of the children evacuated from Britain during WWII. In response to her request for information about survivors of the Benares disaster, Connie, Ted Johns' sister, contacts her. As Jessica digs deeper into the story Connie reveals, she realizes that the events of that fateful night in 1940 are haunting the present and when the two sets of human bones are found in the grounds of Goonzoyle the past and the present collide. Utterly compelling and cleverly constructed, The Mystery Writer is a tantalizing read that both haunts and intrigues.