Client details
Robert Goddard
| Simon Trewin | Assistant: Ariella Feiner |
Robert Goddard was born in Hampshire and read History at Cambridge. His 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. His first Harry Barnett novel, Into the Blue, was winner of the first WHSmith Thumping Good Read Award and was dramatized for TV, starring John Thaw. He is renowned for creating complex mysteries that keep the reader guessing until the end. So addictively challenging are his novels that he has built a large following of dedicated fans. For more information about Robert Goddard please visit his website at http://www.robertgoddardbooks.co.uk/ Latest Publication: LONG TIME COMING, Transworld, (7 January 2010) The new mystery from Robert Goddard. Eldritch Swan is a dead man. Or at least that is what his nephew Stephen has always been told. Until one day Eldritch walks back into his life after 36 years in an Irish prison. He won't reveal any of the details of his incarceration, insisting only that he is innocent of any crime. His return should be of interest to no-one. But the visit of a solicitor with a mysterious request will take Eldritch and his sceptical nephew from sleepy seaside Paignton to London, where an exhibition of Picasso paintings from the prestigious Brownlow collection proves to be the starting point on a journey that will transport them back to the Second World War and the mystery behind Eldritch's imprisonment. In 1940, he was personal assistant to a wealthy diamond dealer in Antwerp, whose collection of modern art was the envy of many. The subsequent disappearance of those paintings began a trail of murder and intrigue which was to have a catastrophic effect on Eldritch's life. But untangling the web of murky secrets, family ties and old betrayals that conceals the truth will prove to be a dangerous pursuit for Eldritch and Stephen. Before long, a mysterious enemy is doing everything possible to stop the truth emerging - at whatever cost... Reviews and praise for Robert Goddard: "Likely to suck you in from the first few pages. . .You'll find yourself unable to stop reading as trespass, theft, murder and duplicity are perfectly thrown into the mix." Peterborough Evening Telegraph on LONG TIME COMING “It’s all much too complicated to explain. Which is, of course, the maddening fun of it.” New York Times Book Review "Goddard is a master of the clever twist." Sunday Telegraph "Sure to have the reader unable to leave the armchair until every page has been turned. A fantastically engaging read" Waterstones Books Quarterly "Goddard writes and plots with accurate, correct precision; you feel he knows every setting and was witness to every scene" Literary Review "Fast-paced and full of twists, it's an involving page-turner." Choice "This is pulse-racing stuff, delivered with all the panache that we have come to expect from Goddard" Good Book Guide |
| Publication Details | Notes |
|---|---|
| FOUND WANTING 2008 Transworld | Richard Eusden is on his way to work in London when he is intercepted by his ex-wife, Gemma. She has sad news of his old friend, her other ex-husband, Marty Hewitson. Marty is dying, but needs a favour done for him – now, today, at once. Eusden reluctantly agrees and sets off on what should be a simple errand. But, soon it turns into a race for life, his and Marty’s, across Belgium, Germany and Denmark and on into the Nordic heart of a mystery that somehow connects Marty’s long dead grandfather, Clem Hewitson, an Isle of Wight police officer, with the tragic fate of the Russian Royal Family. |
| NAME TO A FACE 2007 Transworld | A sequence of extraordinary events over the past 300 years. A chain of intrigue, deceit, greed and murder. |
| NEVER GO BACK 2006 Transworld | Harry Barnett is attending a lavish reunion to mark the fiftieth anniversary of their RAF days. During the war Harry and his fellow RAF conscripts spent three months in a Scottish castle where they acted as guinea pigs in a psychological experiment. The reunion is to take place in the same castle. It will be a chance to see friends, settle old scores and lay a few ghosts to rest. |
| SIGHT UNSEEN 2005 Transworld | One summer's day in 1981 a two-year-old girl, Tamsin Hall, was abducted during a picnic at the famous prehistoric site of Avebury in Wiltshire. Her seven-year-old sister Miranda was knocked down and killed by the abductor's van. The girls were in the care of their nanny, Sally Wilkinson. One of the witnesses to this tragic event was David Umber, a Ph.D student who was waiting at the village pub to keep an appointment with a man called Griffith who claimed he could help Umber with his researches into the letters of 'Junius', the pseudonymous eighteenth century polemicist who was his Ph.D subject. It is not until 23 years later that the long concealed truth about that day will be revealed. |
| PLAY TO THE END 2004 Transworld | Actor Toby Flood, formerly of big and small screen but now seldom seen on either, arrives in Brighton on the first Sunday in December with the other cast members of the Joe Orton play LODGER IN THE THROAT. They have been on tour since September, but hopes of a West End transfer have been abandoned and they are all looking forward to the end of the run the following Saturday.Flood is visited that night by his estranged wife. Jenny, who is worried about a strange man who has taken to hanging around outside. When Flood agrees to confront him, the prospects of him surviving until the close of the show suddenly start to look very far from good. |
| DAYS WITHOUT NUMBER 2003 Transworld | Nick Paleologus is summoned to help resolve a dispute which threatens to set his brothers and sisters against their aged and irascible father. Michael Paleologus, retired archeologist and supposed descendent of the last Emperors of Byzantium, lives alone at Trennor, a remote and rambling house in Cornwall. A ridiculously generous offer has been made for the house, but he refuses to sell despite the urgings of his children, for whom the proceeds would solve a variety of problems. Nick accomplished little in the role of mediator, but the stalemate is soon tragically broken. Only then do Nick and his siblings discover why their father was bound at all costs to reject the offer and what may really be the motives of the prospective buyer. |
| DYING TO TELL 2001 Transworld | Lance Bradley`s indolent life in Somerset is interrupted when he agrees to help the sister of an old friend, Rupert Alder. His attempts to track down Alder lead Bradley into the centre of a mystery. |
| SEA CHANGE 2000 Transworld | Robert Goddard takes us to eighteenth-century London, Amsterdam and Rome for a spell-binding mystery involving a mysterious package, murder and financial scandal. |
| SET IN STONE 1999 Transworld | After the sudden death of his wife, Tony Sheridan goes to stay with his sister-in-law and her husband at their strange, moated house, Otherways. There, he discovers secrets that lead to disaster. |
| IN PALE BATTALIONS 1998 Transworld | Six months after her husband's sudden death, Leonora Galloway sets off for a holiday in Paris with her daughter Penelope. They decide to visit the Thiepval Memorial to the dead of the Battle of the Somme near Amiens. Amongst those commemorated is her husband. The date of his death is recorded as 30th April, 1916. But Leonora wasn't born until 14th March 1917.Penelope at once supposes a simple wartime illegitimacy as the clue to her mother's unhappy childhood and the family's sundered connections with her aristocratic heritage, about which she has always known so little.But nothing could have prepared her, or the reader, for the extraordinary story that is about to unfold. |
| CAUGHT IN THE LIGHT 1998 Transworld | On assignment in Vienna, photographer Ian Jarrett falls for a woman he meets by chance, Marian Esguard. Back in England, he leaves his wife to meet Marian. She fails to show. Ian sets out to solve a mystery that may be 170 years old. |
| BEYOND RECALL 1997 Transworld | A murder mystery that moves between 1981 and 1947. Chris Napier delves into past events to try and find out who killed his great uncle, Joshua Bradwell. Soon larger mysteries begin to dog Chris's footsteps into the past. |
| OUT OF THE SUN 1996 Transworld | When Harry is told that his son, David, is in a coma, he knows there must be a mistake - he has no son. But he soon finds that he has and that other scientists like David have died mysteriously. Is David a victim of attempted murder? |
| BORROWED TIME 1995 Transworld | A walker encounters an elegant middle-aged woman who seems strangely out of place on a footpath along Offa's Dyke, and a few days later he discovers that she was raped and murdered shortly after their meeting. Peculiar events follow. |
| CLOSED CIRCLE 1993 Transworld | In 1931, a new and luxurious transatlantic liner is making her eastward passage. Among the first-class passengers are two smooth English confidence tricksters, leaving a little awkwardness behind them in America. |
| HAND IN GLOVE 1992 Transworld | Tristram Abberley was an English poet whose reputation was sealed when he died fighting in the Spanish Civil War. Nearly 50 years on his sister is murdered during a robbery at her home, but robbery is not all that lies behind her death. |
| TAKE NO FAREWELL 1991 Transworld | Twelve years before, Geoffrey Staddon had left the woman he loved and the house that was the best thing he had ever done as an architect. Now, in 1935, a murder and its consequences compel him to return. |
| INTO THE BLUE 1990 Transworld | Harry Barnett is a middle-aged failure, leading a shabby existence in the shadow of a past disgrace, reduced to caretaking a friend's villa in Rhodes. When a young woman guest disappears he is under suspicion of murder. |
| PAINTING THE DARKNESS 1989 Transworld | One afternoon in 1882, William Trenchard is in the garden of his happy home. When a stranger arrives at the gate, he is puzzled but not alarmed. He cannot know the destruction this man will wreak on all he holds most dear... |
