Books | Felicity's Gate
Author Biography
Julian Cole is a journalist who lives with his family in York, where he runs, makes bread and enjoys the setting. This is his second Rounder Brothers novel, following The Amateur Historian.
Publication Date
November 2009
Blurb
"I would like to report a dreadful occurrence. The artist Jane Wragge has been injured, fatally so. You will find her in the hall of her house. The front door is open."
Jane's body is found at the bottom of her stairs, beneath a wall of her paintings. The chief suspect is her friend and lover, Moses Mundy, who has gone on the run and continues to elude the police, led by Chief Inspector Sam Rounder. But Sam soon discovers there is more to this murder than meets the eye: what connection does her death have to York Cemetery, and with the five men whose naked portraits she mysteriously painted?
In this follow-up to The Amateur Historian, the two Rounder brothers Sam and Rick continue to square up across the sibling divide, with private eye Rick working for Moses to prove his innocence. Which brother will find the solution and what has a cheating husband got to do with it all?
Praise for The Amateur Historian
"A young girl disappears from a York slum in 1901. A hundred years later, the same thing happens - though this time the little girl is from a wealthy middle class family. Ex-copper Rick Rounder blames himself for the death of a child a few years earlier. He fled to Australia to forget the nightmares, but has now returned to his home city as a private eye. His elder brother Sam is a detective inspector with the York police. Both become involved in the case of the Amateur Historian - a Peeping Tom character with an unhealthy interest in girls. In Julian Cole's first published novel, something rotten lurks beneath the surface of modern day York. Past and present intertwine, and in the mind of returned exile Rick, York is oppressive, crowded and dank - more like the slum city of 100 years ago than the international tourist city of today. An unsettling debut that simmers with menace."
- Stephen Lewis, Books Editor, The Press
"Like his namesake Martina, Julian Cole has produced a real page-turner, piling mysteries on top of twists and turns whilst keeping a human heart beating at the centre of his fine debut novel, The Amateur Historian. Cole wears his crime influences on his sleeve, but comes up with some refreshing takes on an otherwise tired genre: the novel’s central conceit, that the death of a girl a hundred years ago must be solved in order to find a missing girl in modern-day peril, is both skillfully handled and excitingly readable. Cole’s prose sparkles with the odd gem, and he has taken care to construct a labyrinthine plot with the weight of history acting as the walls that close in on the reader, who is kept in the dark in all the right places. Another winner in this pacy thriller is the city of York, often dismissed as a quaint tourist trap, but here it’s like a character itself with a seamy underbelly that rivals the dirty histories of Sam and Rick Rounder, cop and private eye respectively, the novel’s dual protagonists whose sibling rivalry provides the humanity and drives the narrative onwards...[This novel] marks Cole out as a blockbusting new talent on the crime market. And with more Rounder Brothers thrillers promised, it’s worth getting in on a great new series at the very start."
- The Bookseller
First chapter
Click here to access a PDF of the first chapter.
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