From Publishers Weekly
With this nimble meld of ghost story, moral fable and psychological drama, Fyfield ( Shadow Play ; Question of Guilt ) joins the ranks of those writers--Peter Dickinson and Michael Dibdin among them--who reinvent the genre with social commentary and impressionistic narrative brushstrokes. Red-haired Sarah Fortune, a young and effortlessly attractive widowed lawyer, goes to East Anglia to sort out the muddled legal affairs of the family of recently deceased Henry Pardoe. In the same seaside town two years earlier, red-haired Elisabeth Tysall committed suicide by drowning. A year later her husband Charles--who had also been violently obsessed with Sarah--did the same, walking into the sea. While villagers report sightings of both Tysall ghosts, Sarah gradually discerns the twists within the troubled Pardoe family. She deals with a pouting, brutal younger son, a bitter older son (a doctor and once the lover of Elisabeth Tysall) and a teenaged daughter in love with a local boy; the widow Pardoe appears to be over-the-top loony. Honing in on their secrets, Sarah gradually reveals secrets of her own. This is a complex, unsettling novel. Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Another psychological mystery for readers who appreciate a protagonist with a lawyerly viewpoint. Sarah Fortune's law firm posts her to a seaside town to do estate work for a peculiar family characterized by weird members and dangerous secrets.Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Booklist
Fyfield's Sarah Fortune stories shouldn't work. Her characters are odd even by the standards of British mysteries. Coincidences and improbabilities power her plots, yet they make sense, somehow, in the alternative reality she creates. This time mentor Ernest Matthewson sends solicitor Sarah to the "overgrown village of Merton on Sea" to resolve estate matters for a former client's survivors--and to ease a separation between Sarah and his stepson, Malcolm, who saved her life in a previous Fortune novel. But Sarah's attacker drowned in Merton, and his brutalized wife committed suicide there, so memories of past pain mingle with the woes of batty Mrs. Pardoe and her children: the intense physician Julian; angry and neurotic Edward; and teenager Joanna, torn by hopes and doubts. Fyfield confronts central human dichotomies here--good and evil, madness and sanity, love and hate, the seductive appeals of revenge and of forgiveness--in a taut and involving thriller that demands suspension of disbelief against all odds. Mary Carroll


From Kirkus Reviews
Fyfield continues her assault on the English Gothic (Shadow Play, 1993, etc.; see also Half Light, as Frances Hegarty, 1993) in this tale of Sarah Fortune, unassuming solicitor dispatched to the Norfolk village of Merton on Sea to help the fractious Pardoes divide the spoils of Henry Pardoe's estate. As capable Sarah nestles awkwardly into a family that includes Henry's placidly senile widow, Jennifer (``Mouse''), and his children Julian (an embittered physician), Edward (a realtor who won't grow up), and Joanna (a kid sister trapped at home), Sarah recalls her uneasy involvement with their abusive, late neighbor Charles Tysall, whose wife, Elisabeth (like Sarah, a redhead Charles had become obsessed with), killed herself to escape him, and who followed her into sucide shortly thereafter. The sense of menace is compounded by rumors of a violent white- haired ghost prowling the coastline, but despite the unforgettable tableaux Fyfield's readers have come to expect--especially Sarah's breakthough scenes with Julian, Mouse, and a battered local boy--the persistent echoes of Robert Browning's ``Porphyria's Lover'' never ignite this doomy tale. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


Review
"Brilliant-- A superb novel of psychological suspense that will keep you reading into the night." -The Globe and Mail

"Fyfield is well on her way to challenging the P.D. Jameses of this world for crime supremacy." -The Toronto Sun

"Elegant and Unnerving--Another haunting story of romantic obsession--[with] richly detailed portraits of complex people." -The New York Times Book Review

"Frances Fyfield, a lawyer herself, adds an extra dimension to detection." -P.D. James

"Frances Fyfield is a gifted writer who writes brilliantly about the darker side of English life. She should appeal to fans of Ruth Rendell and P.D. James." -The Denver Post


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Book Description
Sarah Fortune's name belies her recent life. A beautiful red-haired attorney, she's still recovering from a macabre attack by a now-deceased client, Charles Tysall, who became obsessed with her. Now the senior partner in her firm has asked her to travel to the seaside town of Merton to sort out a legacy left to the feuding Pardoe family. It is the same town where Tysall spent his summer holidays.

Sarah arrives in Merton to find there is more to sort out than the huge, convoluted estate. And as she moves closer to the heart of the Pardoe family secrets, she also moves toward a confrontation with a tall, white-haired vagrant who has begun to haunt the quay--a malevolent and cunning "ghost" out of Sarah's own past.

"Elegant and unnerving . . . Another haunting story of romantic obsession." --The New York Times Book Review


From the Publisher
'Vintage Fyfield - tense, sharply observed and fiendishly clever.' - She 'Gripping and disturbing.' - Sunday Express 'A devilishly intricate plot ... chilling and entertaining.' - Good Housekeeping 'Driven by the excellence of her writing and her superb mastery of frissony atmosphere.' - The Times Critical acclaim for Frances Fyfield: 'Frances Fyfield ... is at the forefront of the latest generation of contenders for the title of British Queen of Crime ... all the physical and emotional sadism of a Jacobean revenge drama... Perfectly Pure and Good shows that she has the courage to stretch the genre to its very limit.' - Mail on Sunday 'Elegant and unnerving novel of psychological suspense ... another haunting story of romantic obsession.' - New York Times 'A novel to cherish.' - Times Literary Supplement 'A complex, unsettling novel.' - Publishers Weekly

ANNOTATION

From the author of Shadow Play and the winner of the Silver Dagger award comes a new thriller. Settling a family-estate litigation, London solicitor Sarah Fortune encounters a chilling domestic drama involving madness, suicide--and a violent white-haired ghost on the prowl.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Widely acclaimed as one of England's finest crime novelists at work today, Frances Fyfield has garnered praise for the sophistication of her characterizations, and the intelligence and raw suspense of her narratives. Now, in Perfectly Pure and Good, Fyfield gives us a taut, riveting psychodrama that explores the darkest borders between love and hate. When Sarah Fortune is sent by her London law firm to the small seaside town of Merton, she senses that there is more to sort out than the huge and convoluted Pardoe estate. Guilt, insecurity, unrequited love, and a touch of insanity are only a few of the problems besetting the Pardoes. Sarah comes to know the "barmy, barking, out of her tree" matriarch; the eldest son - a churlish and demonically driven doctor; the middle "child" - a twenty-two-year-old braggart and brute who plays "happy families" with his dolls when he's not playing nasty practical jokes; and the teenage daughter, bright with gilded innocence and dour with hidden, unwanted knowledge. But what Sarah cannot know is that as she moves closer to the heart of the Pardoe family secrets, she is also moving toward a confrontation with the tall, white-haired vagrant who has begun to haunt the townspeople and insinuate himself into the power struggles of the Pardoe children - a malevolent and cunning "ghost" out of Sarah's own past.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

With this nimble meld of ghost story, moral fable and psychological drama, Fyfield ( Shadow Play ; Question of Guilt ) joins the ranks of those writers--Peter Dickinson and Michael Dibdin among them--who reinvent the genre with social commentary and impressionistic narrative brushstrokes. Red-haired Sarah Fortune, a young and effortlessly attractive widowed lawyer, goes to East Anglia to sort out the muddled legal affairs of the family of recently deceased Henry Pardoe. In the same seaside town two years earlier, red-haired Elisabeth Tysall committed suicide by drowning. A year later her husband Charles--who had also been violently obsessed with Sarah--did the same, walking into the sea. While villagers report sightings of both Tysall ghosts, Sarah gradually discerns the twists within the troubled Pardoe family. She deals with a pouting, brutal younger son, a bitter older son (a doctor and once the lover of Elisabeth Tysall) and a teenaged daughter in love with a local boy; the widow Pardoe appears to be over-the-top loony. Honing in on their secrets, Sarah gradually reveals secrets of her own. This is a complex, unsettling novel. (Apr.)

Library Journal