Master of the plot twist

There is perhaps just one thing upon which critics and readers alike agree -- that he is the master of the plot twist, a dazzling storyteller who grips your attention from the first paragraph, and holds it until the final, totally unexpected surprise on the last page.

Sea Change is vintage Goddard, a historical novel which will strike many contemporary chords. It opens just as the South Sea Bubble has burst in the early 18th century. What had seemed like a failsafe, get-rich-quick dream investment has crashed, leaving many ruined. There is a hunger for retribution and the accusations of corruption are being aimed high, even as high as the King himself. The most powerful in the land will go to any lengths to divert responsibility from themselves.

William Spandrel is a mapmaker whose profession has been ruined by the financial problems of his formerly wealthy investors. One of them, Sir Theodore Janssen, decides to make Spandrel pay his debt in kind. Janssen is in possession of a book detailing the innermost workings of the South Sea Company -- a book whose contents will reveal the guilty parties, those whose greed and dishonesty have brought ruin upon so many. (Bantam Press £16.99). MYSTERY, crime, thriller, even historical romance -- Robert Goddard's novels are impossible to pigeonhole, and have been described in all these ways.

There is perhaps just one thing upon which critics and readers alike agree -- that he is the master of the plot twist, a dazzling storyteller who grips your attention from the first paragraph, and holds it until the final, totally unexpected surprise on the last page.

Sea Change is vintage Goddard, a historical novel which will strike many contemporary chords. It opens just as the South Sea Bubble has burst in the early 18th century. What had seemed like a failsafe, get-rich-quick dream investment has crashed, leaving many ruined. There is a hunger for retribution and the accusations of corruption are being aimed high, even as high as the King himself. The most powerful in the land will go to any lengths to divert responsibility from themselves.

William Spandrel is a mapmaker whose profession has been ruined by the financial problems of his formerly wealthy investors. One of them, Sir Theodore Janssen, decides to make Spandrel pay his debt in kind. Janssen is in possession of a book detailing the innermost workings of the South Sea Company -- a book whose contents will reveal the guilty parties, those whose greed and dishonesty have brought ruin upon so many. (Bantam Press £16.99).