About Robert Goddard

Robert Goddard was born in Hampshire. He was educated at Price's Grammar School, Fareham (1966-1973). At Price's he gained entry to Peterhouse College, Cambridge where he read History. He worked as an educational administrator in Devon before becoming a full-time novelist.

Closed Circle 

The year is 1931. The new and luxurious transatlantic liner Empress of Britain is on her eastward passage. Among the first-class passengers on board are two English confidence tricksters, making a discreet exit from a little awkwardness they have left behind them in the United States. A chance meting on deck brings them a tempting new target in the shape of Miss Charnwood and her niece, the beautiful Diana, only child of the immensely wealthy Fabian Charnwood. 

It's a trick they've pulled before, with some success. Charm the daughter into an engagement to marry, then get the father to buy you off. So confident are they of success, in fact, that they make a pact: whichever of them wins Diana Charnwood's love will share his fortune with the other. Who would imagine that these smooth operators would let their hearts rule their heads? Or that violent death would find its way into their neat little scheme? Or that they would stumble into something much darker and deeper than either had suspected? 

Borrowed Time 

While out walking Robin Timariot encounters a woman, with whom he has an unforgettable conversation. On his return home, Timariot discovers the woman was raped and murdered and he becomes obsessed with the search for the truth. 

Caught in the Light 

On assignment in Vienna, photographer Ian Jarrett falls desperately in love with a woman he meets by chance, Marian Esguard. Back in England, he breaks up with his wife and goes to meet Marian at an agreed rendezvous. She fails to show. Ian sets out to solve a mystery that may be 170 years old. 

Set in Stone 

Recovering from the recent death of his wife in a tragic accident, Tony Sheridan goes to stay with his sister-in-law, Lucy, and her husband, long-time friend Matt, in their home in the country. Disturbed by memories of his wife, and an attraction for Lucy, he starts having weird dreams. 

Sea Change 

It is January 1721. London is reeling from the effects of the greatest financial scandal of the age, the collapse of the South Sea Bubble. William Spandrel, a penniless mapmaker, is offered a discharge of his debts by his principal creditor, Sir Theodore Janssen, a director of the South Sea Company, on one condition: he must secretly convey an important package to a friend of Janssen's, Ysbrand de Vries, in Amsterdam. 

The package safely delivered, Spandrel barely survives an attempt on his life, only to be blamed for the murder of de Vries himself. When de Vries's secretary, his English wife and the package itself go missing shortly afterwards, Spandrel realizes that he has become a pawn in several people's games. British Government agents, and others, are on his trail, believing that the mysterious package contains secrets that could spark a revolution in England. 

Spandrel's only chance of survival is to recover the package and place its contents in the right hands. But whose are the right hands? And what exactly are the contents? 

Dying to Tell 

Lance Bradley, idling his life away in the little Somerset town of Glastonbury, suddenly receives a call for help from the eccentric sister of his old friend Rupert Alder. Rupe appears to have vanished without trace. Reluctantly, Lance goes to London, to discover that Rupe's employers want him tried for fraud. A Japanese businessman claims he has stolen a document of huge importance. And a private detective is demanding money for trying to trace, on Rupe's behalf, an American called Townley, who was involved in a mysterious death at Wilderness Farm, near Glastonbury, back in 1963. 

No sooner has Lance decided that whatever Rupe was up to is too risky to get involved in than he finds that he already is involved, and the only way out is to get in deeper still. Where is Rupe? What is the document he has stolen? Who is Townley? And what happened at Wilderness Farm nearly thirty years before that holds the key to a secret more amazing than Lance Bradley could ever have imagined? 

Dying to Tell is another classic Goddard mystery: intricate, fascinating and deeply satisfying to the very last page

Days Without Number 

Nick Paleologus is summoned to the unyielding bosom of his family to help resolve a dispute which threatens to set his brothers and sisters against their aged and irascible father. Michael Paleologus, retired archaeologist and supposed descendant of the last Emperors of Byzantium, lives alone at Trennor, a remote and rambling house on the Cornish bank of the Tamar. A ridiculously generous offer has been made for the house, but he refuses to sell despite the urgings of his children, for whom the proceeds would solve a variety of problems. 

Nick accomplishes little in the role of mediator, but the stalemate is soon tragically broken. Only then do Nick and his siblings discover why their father was bound at all costs to reject the offer and what may really be the motives of the prospective buyer. 

Their increasingly desperate efforts to conceal the truth drag them into a deadly conflict with an unseen and unknown enemy, who seems as determined to force them into a confrontation with their family's past as he is to conceal his own identity. 

Late in the day, perhaps too late, Nick realizes that the only way to escape from the trap their persecutor has set for them is to hunt him down, wherever - and whoever - he may be. But the hunt involves excavating a terrible secret from their father's archaeological career. And once that secret is known, nothing will ever be the same again. 

Sight Unseen 

Another Classic Mystery From The 'master Of The Clever Twist'. One Summer's Day In 1981 A Two-year-old Girl, Tamsin Hall, Was Abducted During A Picnic At The Famous Prehistoric Site Of Avebury In Wiltshire. Her Seven-year-old Sister Miranda Was Knocked Down And Killed By The Abductor's Van. The Girls Were In The Care Of Their Nanny, Sally Wilkinson. One Of The Witnesses To This Tragic Event Was David Umber, A Phd Student Who Was Waiting At The Village Pub To Keep An Appointment With A Man Called Griffin. But Griffin Failed To Show Up, And Umber Never Heard From Him Again. Tamsin Hall Was Never Seen Again Either.

Name To A Face 

The brain-teasing new thriller from the “master of the clever twist.”

A sequence of extraordinary events over the past 300 years provides the links in a chain of intrigue, deceit, greed and murder:

The loss of HMS Association with all hands in 1707.

An admiralty clerk's secret mission thirty years afterwards.

A fatal accident during a dive to the wreck in 1996.

An expatriate's reluctant return home ten years later. The simple task he has come to accomplish, shown to be anything but. A woman he recognizes but cannot identify.

It's a conspiracy of circumstances that is about to unravel his life. And with it, the past.

Found Wanting 

It begins with an innocent request . 

One unremarkable winter morning, civil servant Richard Eusden is on his way to work in London when he is intercepted by his ex-wife, Gemma. She has sad news of his old friend, her other ex-husband, Marty Hewitson. Marty is dying, but needs one last favour done for him - now, today, at once. 

Eusden reluctantly agrees. But what should be a simple errand soon it turns into a race for life - his and Marty's.It takes him across Belgium, Germany and Denmark and on into the Nordic heart of a mystery that somehow connects Marty's long dead grandfather, Clem Hewitson, an Isle of Wight police officer, with the tragic fate of the Russian Royal Family, murdered ninety years earlier. 

To his dismay, Eusden discovers that he can trust no one, not even his old, dying friend, in his battle with those who are determined to steal the secret they believe he and Marty hold, and who will kill for it if they have to. Every move Eusden makes threatens to be a step closer to disaster. But move he must if he is to escape the clutches of history. It is his only hope . 

Eusden's pursuit of the truth takes him, and the reader, on a lightning tour of Europe while harking back to the savage and terrifying events which have cast a blight on the continent's future for so long. From its opening page to its dramatic conclusion, Found Wanting is Robert Goddard at his spellbinding best

01.Into the Blue 

Harry Barnett is a middle-aged failure, leading a shabby existence in the shadow of a past disgrace, reduced to caretaking a friend's villa on the island of Rhodes and working in a bar to earn his keep. Then a guest at the villa - a young woman he had instantly and innocently warmed to - disappears on a mountain peak. 

Under suspicion of her murder, Harry stumbles on a set of photographs taken by Heather Mallender in the weeks before her disappearance. Desperately, obsessed by the mystery that has changed his life, he begins to trace back the movements and encounters that led to the moment when she vanished into the blue. The trail leads him back to England, to a world he thought he had left for ever, and at every step of the way a new and baffling light is shed on all the assumptions that have made Harry what he is. 

02.Out of the Sun 

When Harry is informed that his son, David, is in a diabetic coma, he is certain there must be a mistake, since he does not have a son. But he soon discovers that he does and that other scientists employed like David have died in mysterious circumstances. Is David the victim of attempted murder? 

03.Never Go Back 

In the spellbinding new mystery by the master of "the clever twist," a group of ex-RAF comrades journey to a Scottish castle for a reunion. But by the time they reach their destination, two of them are dead.

Harry Barnett is leading a contented life in Vancouver with his wife and daughter when he is brought back to England by the death of his mother. He intends to spend just a few days sorting out her affairs when a chance meeting he will regret for the rest of his life makes him change his plans. Two old acquaintances from his National Service days track Harry down to his mother's house — the last address they had for him. A lavish reunion has been organized to mark the fiftieth anniversary of their RAF days. Harry decides to go.

During the war, Harry and his fellow RAF conscripts spent three months in a Scottish castle where they acted as guinea pigs in a psychological experiment. The reunion is to take place in the same castle. It will be a chance to see friends, settle old scores and lay a few ghosts to rest.

The party begins on the train up to Aberdeen, until the apparent suicide of one of their number shatters the holiday atmosphere. Their arrival in Scotland seems under a cloud, and when another comrade dies soon after their arrival, Harry is gripped by a sense of foreboding. As well, the recollections of the old comrades of their time in the castle are frighteningly different, and unexplained events from 1955 still haunt them. As Harry tries to solve the mystery of what really happened fifty years ago, he uncovers an extraordinary secret that convinces him he will never leave the castle alive.

Beyond Recall 

A murder mystery that moves between a wedding party in 1981 and a murder in 1947. Chris Napier decides to delve into the events of the past to try and find out who killed his great uncle, Joshua Bradwell. Before long, larger mysteries begin to dog Chris's footsteps into the past. 

Hand In Glove 

Tristram Abberley was an English poet of the 1930s whose reputation was sealed when he died fighting for the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War. Nearly fifty years later his sister Beatrix is murdered during what appears to be a robbery at her home, but robbery - it transpires - is only part of the motive that underlies her death. Beatrix is the victim of a dark conspiracy, one that her loved ones are powerless to defeat. 

But nothing is quite as it seems in a Robert Goddard novel. In a narrative that moves between Cheltenham and New York, Paris and rural Wales, Tunbridge Wells and wartime Spain, the conspirators themselves are caught up in a chain of dramatic events that are the consequences of meddling in the dark secrets of the legendary poet. 

In Pale Battalions 

Six months after her husband's sudden death, Leonora Galloway sets off for a holiday in Paris with her daughter Penelope. At last the time has come when secrets can be shared and explanations begin... 

Their journey starts with an unscheduled stop at the imposing Thiepval Memorial to the dead of the Battle of the Somme near Amiens. Amongst those commemorated is Leonora's father. The date of his death is recorded as 30th April, 1916. But Leonora wasn't born until 14th March 1917. 

Penelope at once supposes a simple wartime illegitimacy as the clue to her mother's unhappy childhood and the family's sundered connections with her aristocratic heritage, about which she has always known so little. 

But nothing could have prepared her, or the reader, for the extraordinary story that is about to unfold

Long Time Coming

In Antwerp in 1939, a Jewish diamond trader flees Nazi Europe, leaving his priceless collection of Picasso paintings and diamonds with a friend who takes them to London. The boat he flees on sinks, leaving no survivors. Fast forward to 1976 when his penniless family tries to track down the missing paintings. A classic thriller with Goddard's trademark plot twists.

Past Caring

Why should distinguished Edwardian Cabinet minister Edwin Strafford resign at the height of his parliamentary career? Why does the woman he loves so suddenly and coldly reject him? Why, seventy years later, should people go to such lengths - even as far as murder - to prevent the truth from being revealed? 

Martin Radford, history graduate, disaffected and unemployed, leaps at the chance to get to the island of Madeira and begin the hunt for a solution to the intriguing secret of Edwin Strafford's fall from grace. However, his seeming good fortune turns to nightmare as his investigation triggers a bizarre and violent train of events which remorselessly entangles him and those who believed they had escaped the spectre of crimes long past but never paid for... 

Play To The End

Actor Toby Flood, formerly of big and small screen but now seldom seen on either, arrives in Brighton on the first Sunday in December with the other cast members of the Joe Orton play Lodger In The Throat. They have been on tour since September, but hopes of a West End transfer have been abandoned and they are all looking forward to the end of the run the following Saturday. Flood is visited that night by his estranged wife. Jenny, now living with wealthy entrepreneur Roger Colborn, whose country residence, Wickhurst Manor, lies just north of Brighton. Jenny runs a shop in the Lanes and is worried about a strange man who has taken to hanging around outside. Roger has dismissed her concerns, but she wants something done and hopes Toby will agree for old times' sake to follow the man to wherever he lives and get to the bottom of his behaviour. Reluctantly, Flood agrees. Next day he trails the man to his house and confronts him. Derek Osawin is an unemployed loner, who blames Colborn for his father's death from cancer, on account of dangerous practices at the long since closed plastics factory run by Roger and his father, the late Sir Walter Colborn.


Enjoy and Seed!!