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A CHRISTMAS RESOLUTION by Anne Perry

A CHRISTMAS RESOLUTION

by Anne Perry

Pub Date: Nov. 3rd, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-12958-6
Publisher: Ballantine

An unexpected betrothal threatens the peace and sanctity of Christmas 1872 in a village near London.

Celia Hooper would love to rejoice in her friend Clementine Appleby’s engagement to Seth Marlowe. But her reservations about the man’s brusqueness and troubled history are magnified a thousandfold when he confronts her, accuses her of sending him an anonymous letter charging him with the death of his first wife, Rose, who took their daughter, Flavia, and abandoned him, and demands that she give up her friendship with Clementine. If he doesn’t, Seth threatens, he’ll tell everyone that Celia—pressed to give untrue testimony in a court case in order to save the man she loved, Thames River Police officer John Hooper, from a charge of mutiny for the long-ago rescue of his seagoing mates when their manifestly unfit captain nearly drowned them all—committed perjury. The forced bargain leaves a bitter taste in Celia’s mouth, and soon she’s confessed her earlier sin to the Rev. Arthur Roberson, the local vicar, and John Hooper, now her husband, has gone in search of information about the missing Rose and Flavia Marlowe. The eponymous resolution will come as a revelation only to readers surprised by the verses inside Christmas cards, but Perry spreads kindness, love, and forgiveness so generously that it would be unseasonable to object.

A novella-length sermon on the unexceptionable premise that “God won’t fix it. But He’ll show somebody else how to.”