Borrowed Time: A Novel

Author: Goddard, Robert

Brand: Penguin Random House

Color: Black

Binding: paperback

Format: Deckle Edge

Number Of Pages: 480

Release Date: 04-04-2011

Details: Product Description
One fateful summer evening, businessman Robin Timariot meets a strikingly beautiful woman while out walking. They exchange only a few words, but those words prove to be unforgettable. A few days later, the newspapers are full of the rape and murder of Lady Louise Paxton - and to his horror, Timariot realises that this was the woman he met just hours before her death. A man is swiftly charged and convicted of the crime, but a series of bizarre events begin to convince Timariot that all is not what it seems. Against his better judgement, he is soon sucked into the tortuous complexity of the dead woman's life. But the closer Timariot gets to the truth, the more hideous and uncertain it seems to be. And far too late, he realizes that anybody who uncovers it is unlikely to live...
Review
A thriller in the classic storytelling sense... hugely enjoyable ―
The Times

An atmosphere of taut menace... suspense is heightened by shadows of betrayal and revenge ―
Daily Telegraph
About the Author
Robert Goddard's first novel, Past Caring, was an instant bestseller. Since then, his books have captivated readers worldwide with their edge-of-the-seat pace and their labyrinthine plotting. He has won awards in the UK, the US and acrossEurope and his books have been translated into over thirty languages. In 2019, he won the Crime Writers’ Association’s highest accolade, the Diamond Dagger, for a lifetime achievement in Crime Writing.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter One


It began more than three years ago, on a golden evening of high summer. I'd started out from Knighton that morning on what was projected to be a six-day tramp along the southern half of Offa's Dyke. I've always found I think best when walking alone. And since I had a great deal to think about at the time, a really long walk seemed one way of ensuring I thought clearly and well. Decisions masquerading as choices were closing in around me. Middle age was beckoning, a fork in life's path looming ahead. Nothing was as simple as I wanted it to be, nor as certain. But up in the hills, there was the hope it might seem so.

It was Tuesday the seventeenth of July 1990. A well-remembered date, well remembered and much recorded. A day of baking heat and unbroken sunshine, declining to a dusk of sultry langour. A day of solid walking and serious thinking for me, of bone-hard turf beneath my feet and hazy blue above my head. I saw no buzzards, as I'd hoped to, circling in the thermals, though maybe, after all, there was something hovering up there, out of sight, seeing and knowing what I was heading towards.

I'd travelled up to Knighton by train from Petersfield the previous day, happy to be away and alone at last. My eldest brother, Hugh, had died of a heart attack, aged forty-nine, five weeks before. It had been a shock, of course. A grievous one--especially for my mother. But Hugh and I had never been what you'd call close. Twelve years was just too big an age gap, I suppose. About the only time we'd really got to know each other as brothers was when we'd walked the Pennine Way together, in the summer of 1973. Since his death, the memory of those three distant weeks on the northern fells had become in my mind a sort of talisman of lost fraternity. My trip to the Welsh borders was partly a conscious act of mourning, partly a search for just a few of the pleasures and opportunities life had offered then.

Above all, however, the trip was intended to clear my mind and decide my future. My sister Jennifer and my other two brothers, Simon and Adrian, all worked in the family business, Timariot & Small, of which Hugh had been managing director. In that sense--and several others--I was the odd one out. I used to claim my career with the European Commission in Brussels gave me immunity from their parochial cares and perpetual squabbles. And so it did. Along with absolute security and relative prosperity.

EAN: 9780552164177

Package Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.0 x 1.3 inches

Languages: English