Act of Darkness by Francis King (Hutchinson, 1983)
Act of Darkness is set in a Hill Station in northern India where a wealthy Anglo-Indian family spend the hot summer months during the twilightof the Raj. Gandhi is on the move and the natives are turning mutinous. Late one night some terrorists break into the home, abduct the young son, slit his throat, and throw his body into an outdoor latrine, where it is found the following morning.
At least that is what appears to have happened, but over the remaining two hundred pages we discover — through a series of sly twists and gradual revelations — that the boy’s murderer was a member of the family, and several other family members were complicit. The reverberations of this horrific crime continue to affect the entire family over the rest of their lives.
King has written an interesting and suspensful novel that is cleverly plotted, elegantly written, and psychologically complex. That the plot functions by misleading the reader by withholding information is somewhat bothersome, but my irritation was almost completely alleviated by the books compensating strengths (and the fact that I was guilty of this exact narrative crime in my novel Andorra).
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