A Tale Untold

Free at last from the family ties which have bound her for the past ten years, Brenda Harrington, a spinster of thirty with a legacy of three hundred pounds, sets out for the Continent with few plans, but a determination to find for herself adventure and romance. The year is 1939, and Brenda finds what she is looking for -- she also finds danger. This is the exciting story of the events which take her to Tangier, where she is unwittingly involved in a jewel theft, and finally to Nazi Austria, where she finds herself in a dangerous but somewhat unusual situation. Throughout her travels, she is dogged by the fascinating Maurice Granelle -- a young man as mysterious as he is ubiquitous, and whose true identity Brenda cannot discover. Readers will be intrigued by the story of how she at last reads his secret; of her unexpected meeting with the man she loved when she was nineteen; of the exciting chase which at last brings her to safety, and of the dramatic revelations which await her in England. Brenda is an individual heroine whose love problems are no less absorbing than her adventures; her constantly changing relationship with Maurice is handled with a skill which holds the reader spellbound. By a popular and accomplished writer, this is a fascinating blend of excitement and romance.

A Tale Untold has good bones. The setting -- Europe asimmer in 1937 -- and the plot -- a tourist's mistaken professional identity puts her in danger -- are exciting, the heroine is a capable, and it's fun to watch the two leads prowl warily around each other trying to figure the other out. On the downside, at 319 pages, it's longer than the action warrants by at least 50. A good editor and some condensing would have led to a tauter narrative, with blessedly fewer recursions to "hate his politics/love him despite myself". It's just hard to warm to the "love despite" theme when the politics are, ostensibly, Nazi fascism. Otherwise, an enjoyable, and in moments, quite suspenseful, read. It will remind you of Anne Armstrong Thompson's very 70s (1975, to be exact) Message From Absalom. Wonder if Thompson had read this?