Customer Reviews

Dying Flames

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Robert Barnard's "Dying Flames" is a subtle psychological novel about a middle-aged novelist whose life takes a sudden and unexpected detour. Graham Broadbent is taken aback when one day, a beautiful nineteen-year-old girl named Christa knocks on his door and announces that she is his daughter. After "doing the maths," Graham realizes that there is no way that Christa's story can be true, but nevertheless, he is drawn into her dysfunctional family's soap opera. It turns out that a number of years before Christa was born, Graham had a brief affair with her mother, Peggy Somers. When he meets up with Peggy again, Graham soon learns that she is a deeply egotistical woman who manipulates and exploits everyone for her own gratification. What will happen to Peggy when someone tires of her schemes and selfishness?

Like other top-notch British writers, Barnard delves deeply into his character's psyches, exposing their motivations, strengths, and weaknesses. Graham has failed at marriage and has never wanted to be a parent. Yet, when he becomes reacquainted with Peggy, and learns that she has emotionally and physically left her children to fend for themselves, he discovers a caring side to himself that he never knew existed.

Besides expertly analyzing personalities and relationships, the author skillfully explores the intersection of the past and present. How do our youthful experiences affect us later in life? Graham thinks back to his infatuation with the young Peggy, a girl so vibrant and talented that everyone who knew her loved her. Unfortunately, Peggy became spoiled and craved the limelight as she grew older, resorting to deceit to satisfy her needs. This is a melancholy novel about the incredible damage that a person with beauty, charm, and an unchecked ego can do to those in her orbit. It is also a touching look at an isolated man's tentative steps towards personal redemption.

In Colchester, nineteen years old Christa greets somewhat almost famous author Graham Broadbent by saying "hi dad". She insists that he sired her, but he claims he was overseas at the time she would have been conceived. He knew her mother Peggy, but swears he has no children by any woman, but Christa insists her mom has said for years he was her biological dad before she leaves, disappointed in his denial.

Unable to let it go, Graham visits Peggy, who he enjoyed a fling with two decades ago, but also knows she appreciated all men she met in the early 1980s. However, Peggy stuns Graham when she sweetly says that he indeed sired a child by her, just not Christa. Astonished and confused he wants to meet his son. Drama queen Peggy arranges a dinner for him, her other "dads" and their children to meet one another. At the hostile affair, no one knows who sired whom except perhaps Peggy. She is unable to because someone murdered her.

The sharp sawed satire that has made Robert Barnard a popular author is less in your face than usual, but throughout the novel there is an ironic undercutting of the cast especially the lead protagonist. Mr. Barnard explores how an unanticipated incident can shake a person's demeanor forcing an abrupt change in the mask used to protect one from society intrusion as the former visage fails to shield anymore. Thus readers obtain a deep character story with a late murder mystery as Graham and the audience wonder who amidst the fathers and children killed the matriarch and more important does it really matter.

Harriet Klausner

The main character, Graham Broadbent, is a well-known author who decides to attend a school reunion. While he is in town a knock comes at his hotel room door, and an attractive nineteen-year-old woman, Christa, enters and declares that he is her father. Indeed Graham remembers having had an affair with Christa's mother, Peggy, a girl known for her exquisite acting in George Bernard Shaw's "St. Joan". Graham is able to eliminate himself from the fatherhood with some arithmetical calculations, but his curiosity is aroused.
As luck would have it, Peggy has concluded that Graham must be the father, with the apparent hope that some of Graham's rather minimal celebrity will rub off. She arranges a celebratory dinner at which she makes the announcement of Graham's paternity to her adult son - who, to everyone's surprise, rejects it vehemently and with a great deal of genuine anger.
No one is surprised when Peggy goes missing immediately after this disastrous dinner, especially when she leaves behind a note indicating that she's gone off with some bloke. Apparently this isn't an unusual event. As the days go by and no one hears from her, however, it appears that something more sinister has happened...
The novel is very well read by Gordon Griffin for Soundings Audiobooks.

Robert Barnard is a master storyteller who doesn't write the same book twice. I've enjoyed the humor and satire in many of his crime novels. Dying Flames is as good as anything he's written yet, and in a different vein.

Graham Broadbent's a successful novelist in his early 40's, divorced and childless. When he goes to a school reunion in his old hometown, a teenaged girl introduces herself as his daughter. He went to school with Peggy, and had a brief teenaged affair with her. But Graham could not have been this girl's father - she was born well after they'd left school and he'd lost contact with Peggy; and he was out of the country for months during the time the girl was conceived.

This surprise visit brings Graham back into contact with Peggy, who was the brilliant star of their school play. But Peggy hasn't used her huge acting talent professionally. She's deployed it in her life as a middle-class drama queen - starring in occasional amateur theatre productions and constant offstage antics. She plays fast and loose with the truth, and deceives and manipulates people - including her parents, ex-husband, daughter and teenaged son.

Graham is drawn into the drama himself. When Peggy disappears after staging a big public scene, he takes the kids to stay with him until she comes home. They settle in. The 14 year old boy starts to thrive there. Then Peggy's body is discovered, the murder case goes cold, and Graham pursues some leads himself.

A satisfying book: good murder mystery plot and well-developed interesting characters.

I love his books. They're different and you don't have to be a mystery fan to enjoy them.

Robert Barnard, currently lives with his wife in Yorkshire. He was born in Essex on 23 November, 1936. Educated at the Royal Grammar School in Colchester and at Balliol College, Oxford, taking his Ph.D. from the University of Bergen, Norway, in 1972, he spent many years as a distinguished academic while establishing himself as one of today's most distinguished crime writers. His fascination with the pure detective story is evident in his many novels.

Novelist Graham Broadbent has a good life and one that he can enjoy thanks to the success of his writing. Like many of the characters he has invented and written about over the years, he prefers to keep a low profile, an unassuming man with no skeletons in his cupboard.

But all that changes one evening, an evening much like many others. He is about to leave to speak at his old school reunion when there is a knock on his hotel door. Standing there is an attractive young woman who tells him that she is twenty years old and that her name is Christa. She then drops the bombshell and tells Graham that he is her father. Graham finds himself embroiled in a mess of deception and lies. Something far beyond any book plot he has ever conceived.