FICTION · ROMANCE
Margaret Mayhew
Margaret Mayhew was born in London within the sound of Bow Bell and her earliest memories are of the German Blitz on the city. Her father was a pioneer heart surgeon at Guy’s Hospital and her mother was French. She was educated at Malvern Girls’ College and in Lausanne, Switzerland. She began writing short stories and novels in her mid-thirties and a number of her books are set in the Second World War. Margaret Mayhew has penned over a dozen novels since her first publication in 1976. Born in London three years before the beginning of World War II, Mayhew formed vivid childhood memories of the bombing of the English capital by the Germans, and many of her novels deal with the events of that war and its aftermath. Mayhew's books often have romance and friendship at the center of their tales of men and women caught up in the turbulence and violence of wartime. In The Little Ship, for example, Mayhew presents a cast of young characters, English, Austrian, and German, who are friends and rivals before the war, and then in 1940 are tossed together again as the small boat they once sailed now becomes a lifeboat rescuing soldiers from Dunkirk. Reviewing this British import in Booklist, Patty Engelmann noted that "Mayhew's gem of a book tells about childhood attachments and the upheaval of war."
Meghan Collins stood somewhat aside from the cluster of other journalists in Emergency at Manhattan's Roosevelt Hospital.
— from I'll Be Seeing You
Most acclaimed
Those In Peril
Nick Fewings, the husband of keen family history researcher Suzie, inherits a portrait of his great-grandfather, a famous lifeboatman in St Furseys. Nick and Suzie are keen to find out more, so they decide to take their two teenage children, Tom and Millie, on holiday there. The family stay with Nick's brother Leon and his daughter Anna, and the teen girls' imaginations are soon fired by tales of smugglers on the coast. They are delighted when Nick discovers that his ancestors once owned the Noah's Ark Inn, an old smuggling haunt, but when he and the girls visit they are chased off by its seemingly unbalanced owner. Then one afternoon the girls go missing. Tom thinks they've gone to search for smugglers, but the others aren't so sure. Could the girls have returned to the inn and run into trouble? Or does an offshore archaeological-survey vessel hold the answers? Either way, night is falling and the clock is ticking.
A foreign field
2001
In the first terrifying days of World War I, four British soldiers found themselves trapped behind enemy lines on the western front. They were forced to hide in the tiny French village of Villeret, whose inhabitants made the courageous decision to shelter the fugitives until they could pass as Picard peasants. The Englishman's Daughter is the never-before-told story of these extraordinary men, their protectors, and of the haunting love affair between Private Robert Digby and Claire Dessenne, the most beautiful woman in Villeret. Their passion would result in the birth of a child known as "The Englishman's Daughter," and in an act of unspeakable betrayal, a tragic legacy that would haunt the village for generations to come. Through the testimonies of the villagers and the last letters of the soldiers, acclaimed journalist Ben Macintyre has pieced together a harrowing account of how life was lived behind enemy lines during the Great War, and offers a compelling solution to a gripping mystery that reverberates to this day. - Publisher.
I'll Be Seeing You
Meghan Collins, newly hired TV reporter, makes a startling discovery while on assignment at a large metropolitan hospital. An unidentified young woman dying of a knife wound is rushed into the emergency ward, and Meghan finds herself staring down at a person who could be her double. She is thrust into an investigation that not only involves finding out the identity of the dead woman, but also uncovering the details of her father's puzzling death 10 months earlier. Nine months ago, her much-loved father's car spun off a New York bridge. Now, investigators are saying that there's no trace of his car in the river, and they suspect he faked his own death. With frightening speed, links start to appear between Meghan's father and her dead lookalike. To complicate things further, Meghan's next assignment reveals some questionable procedures at a fertility clinic in regard to in vitro fertilization of identical twins.