FLIGHT OF A WITCH
by Ellis Peters
Where was Annet Beck from Thursday to Tuesday while her anguished parents searched for her, trying to hide her disappearance from the scandal-mongering tongues of Comerford village in Wales? Annetan enigmatic, self-possessed 18-year-old of awe-inspiring beauty, who'd once before attempted escape from Comerfordclaims to remember nothing of those lost days. Meanwhile, the Becks' roomer, deeply smitten schoolteacher Tom Kenyon, saw her disappear over the top of Hallowmount, a legend-haunted nearby hill, on the fateful Thursday, and Detective-Inspector George Felse has placed her on a Birmingham street corner on Saturday night, near the jewelry store where robbery and murder were committed that same night. It's a long haul before the truth finally emergesin an emotionally fraught finale on Hallowmount that sums up the inner turmoil wreaked, not always convincingly, on so many of the story's characters by beautiful Annet. The delicate prose so right for the author's splendid tales of 12th-century England (The Potter's Field, etc., etc.) has a florid resonance here, but the patient reader will find a tension-laden, consistently intriguing puzzle.