A Stain on the Silence

by Andrew Taylor

Book Overview

What if a childless man in his forties discovers that he has a daughter, the result of an affair twenty-five years earlier? What if the daughter is pregnant? And what if she's on the run for murder? James wasn't much more than a child when he had an affair with Lily. Now, 24 years later, Lily confesses to James that their affair led to a daughter, Kate. And Kate desperately needs her father's help, because she is wanted for murder. Yet there...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 140130284X
• ISBN13: 9781401302849
• Release Date: May 2008
• Publisher: Hachette Books
• Length: 384 Pages
• Weight: 1.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 5.2" x 8.0"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

An Interesting and Challenging Ending

I will confess at the outset that I am not as familiar with the work of Andrew Taylor as I should be. He is one of those authors who I know better from reputation than actual reading experience. I am resolved to rectify that situation in 2010 after reading A STAIN ON THE SILENCE, his latest book to be published in the United States. It is a haunting work that elicits enigmatic and disturbing memories that echo long after the reading is complete. A STAIN ON THE SILENCE is a stand-alone work that has been in print in Taylor's native England for several years, but only now is being released in the U.S., even as some of Taylor's subsequent books have been available on this side of the ocean for a bit. I can think of several reasons for the delay, but the quality of this tale would not be one of them. A writer at any stage of his or her career would be happy to create this work. It is based on a singular premise that is the heart of a fear of many men, one that is visited upon the troubled protagonist James. James has a good job, a satisfying if childless marriage, and a nice house. But everything comes unraveled when he receives a phone call that revisits the sins and secrets of his past --- acts that occurred when he was barely out of his childhood. Over the course of an afternoon, James learns that he has an adult daughter who is pregnant and is about to be accused of murder. Taylor spins his story out along twin tracks, one of which bears witness to the systematic destruction of James's predictable and comfortable life, the other of which reveals the secrets of his past that now threaten to ruin him. As James himself notes at one point, no one knows the full story of what happened surrounding the events when he attended boarding school and began an affair with the mother of his best friend, the unpredictably violent Charles. And, as we come to learn in the pages of A STAIN ON THE SILENCE, even the full story may not be the truth entirely --- either in the past or in the present. The story of Kate, the grown daughter who James never knew he had, simply does not add up, whether it concerns her relationship with Charles or with the married man whom, she says, she will be accused of murdering. When James attempts to uncover the truth, the past and the present intersect, colliding violently and with irrevocable results. Wonderfully written and carefully plotted, A STAIN ON THE SILENCE has one of the most interesting and challenging endings since Dennis Lehane's SHUTTER ISLAND. It also provides a lesson for the gentlemen in the audience: we are doomed to be left baffled and slack-jawed by the women in our lives should they deign to leave us so. Like James, we never had a chance.

fascinating character study

Lily Murtheston calls twice asking to speak to Jamie. Since he turned sixteen, everyone calls him James except for one woman back two decades ago when he was in his twenties; so he is taken aback but decides to learn what Lily wants. He muses about being thirteen when he met Lily through her marrying Hugh, the father of his best friend in school Carlo. Dying Lily is in a hospice in Wembley. He goes to see her; Lily informs Jamie that he fathered a child with her years ago; a daughter in trouble needing her father. He insists Katie's father is Lily's husband Hugh, but Lily says Jamie owes her. James meets his daughter Katie just before he leaves the hospice for his home where his wife Nicky is leaving for her book club meeting. Pregnant Katie expects to be arrested for the murder of her former fiancé Sean. She demands her biological father help her; James is confused what to do as his perfect life has been nuked but also fears telling his wife. This is a fascinating character study of a man who seems to have his life together only to find it collapse with the first troubling intrusion, the knowledge of a daughter he sired during an affair over twenty years ago surfaces. Readers will be stunned by how far James will go to avoid confrontation even not telling his wife; though he fails each time he chooses dodging an altercation behind a denial of responsibilities as a defense mechanism to reduce his anxiety, which never works. Although suspense comes extremely late with a clever Hitchcockian psychological twist, fans will enjoy the aptly titled A Stain on the Silence Harriet Klausner