FROM THE PUBLISHER

For anyone who has ever dreamed of going to Manderly again...

Though Rebecca de Winter has been dead for 20 years, her memory still haunts those who loved her. Her old friend and ally, Colonel Julyan, was the local magistrate at the time of her death. He had the painful task of investigating its circumstances. And though the secrets he learned during the inquiry have stayed with him, the burden of that knowledge is heavy, and there are things he has yet to find out.

Julyan enlists the help of his daughter, Ellie, and Tom Gray, a young scholar with a mysterious past of his own. With the discovery of Rebecca's diary, they each, for their own reasons, pursue the truth about the enigmatic woman's death, and try to piece together the mysterious story of her life.

FROM THE CRITICS

Emily Gordon - Washington Post Book World

British novelist Sally Beauman, who takes Rebecca and writes beyond and beneath it, giving fuller voices to some characters and inventing new ones to provide varying perspectives.

Detroit Free Press

If you've never read 'Rebecca, ' Beauman's book is still a cracking good read.

Publishers Weekly

Published more than 60 years ago, Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca still captivates, at least partly because of its insistent ambiguity: we never learn definitively whether Maxim de Winter murdered his stunning first wife, Rebecca, or why Maxim so hastily remarried a mousy younger woman, famously unnamed. Selected by the du Maurier estate, Beauman (Destiny) has written a "companion" to Rebecca that preserves, and even deepens, the earlier novel's crafty evasions. Set in 1951, two decades after Rebecca's death was ruled a suicide, Beauman's story opens with the same (now famous) sentence as the earlier book: "Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again." Elderly, ailing Colonel Arthur Julyan was magistrate in the district when the legendary de Winter mansion mysteriously burned to the ground. Julyan's last days are disturbed by the intrusive visits of Terence Gray, a Scottish academic who claims to be writing a book about Rebecca's death. Then both Julyan's sharp daughter Ellie and Gray, who has secrets of his own, become rattled when Rebecca's personal effects begin arriving at the Julyan home. One of the anonymously sent packages contains Rebecca's journal, written just before her death a possible Rosetta stone. Beauman expertly tells Rebecca's tale from four different perspectives Julyan's, Gray's, Ellie's and, most vividly, Rebecca's without settling which version is nearest the truth. Though a composite Rebecca emerges depressive, possibly schizophrenic, promiscuous, fearless and almost certainly "dangerous" Beauman merely hints at a biological cause, raising titillating, though fully plausible, possibilities. This lushly imagined sequel, which cleverly reproduces the cadences of duMaurier's prose, resurrects Manderley without sweeping away all the artful old cobwebs. Readers should pounce. Agent, Peter Matson. 15-city NPR campaign. (Oct. 2) Forecast: While Rebecca may not be familiar to younger readers (though the 1940 Hitchcock film starring Laurence Olivier is a classic), Beauman's seductive sequel should do well on its own and also prompt interest in the original, which is being reissued in mass market. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

In his third outing (after Irresistible and The Broken Hearts Club), New York police detective Conrad Voort has drinks with his old boyhood friend, Meechum Keef, who asks him to check into a group of people. He gives no explanation, nor does he tell Voort where the people are to be found. After some investigation, Voort finds that several of these people have died accidentally. Then Keef himself goes missing. The people on the list, he realizes, have all been involved in some antigovernment activities, but this is the only thread that binds them together. Because Voort comes from a wealthy, influential family, he is able to gain access to many Washington, DC, records, which provide important information leading to an explanation. Black, the pseudonym for a best-selling New York journalist, has created a complex plot equal to his previous page-turners. From next to nothing, the detectives compile a complete picture of the group on the list and those who are hunting them. Except for Voort's annoying tendency to go to bed with beautiful victims, Black writes nearly perfect thrillers. For all public libraries.Jo Ann Vicarel, Cleveland Heights-University Heights P.L., OH Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

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