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Summary
Summary
"Stunning," raved the New York Times of Sarah Smith's first novel, The Vanished Child. USA Today called her second book, The Knowledge of Water, "as satisfying a mystery as the Mona Lisa's smile." Now the bestselling author of two New York Times Notable Books has created a new, intricately plotted story of intrigue, passion, love, and the most terrible of betrayals. "My wife will murder me unless I murder her first." In the ancient, bloody region of French Flanders looms Montfort castle, home of Count André du Monde, owner of a famous Paris horror theatre. To repair his fortunes, he marries an heiress. Sabine is young, blameless, beautiful, and rich, a perfect leading lady for André's first film--but the eccentric count suspects his wife is a practicing sorceress. Then the Grand Necropolitan Theatre is suddenly stricken with disasters: an unexpected death, a puzzling disappearance, and the savage beating of lead actor Jules Fauchard. André believes Sabine has placed him under a curse. No one believes him, not even his old friend, Alexander von Reisden. To watch over the couple, Reisden agrees to take a part in their film--and finds his own secrets threatened and his marriage becoming as poisoned as theirs. Amid escalating tension, the players assemble at Montfort to begin filming André's movie. Then, within the deep medieval basements of Montfort, life and fiction intersect--as the Grand Necropolitan becomes a true theatre of horrors. Filled with a host of unforgettable characters whose agendas tangle as secretly as the underground tunnels of Flanders, A Citizen of the Country is a compelling novel of desire, poisonous secrets, and love gone terribly wrong.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Set within both the city of Paris and mysterious fictional Montfort Castle in Flanders on the eve of WWI, this stylish and literate historical drama rings down the curtain on Smith's popular trilogy (The Vanished Child; The Knowledge of Water) that illuminates society in early 20th-century France. Dark snatches of memory still trouble Alexander Reisden, director of Jouvet Medical Analyses, an eminent Parisian mental health clinic. Did he murder his grandfather? Is he the heir to an American fortune? As war threatens, Reisden's personal troubles are pushed into the background. On the verge of procuring an important contract with the French army for the mental competency testing of soldiers, he learns that former military hero Maurice Cyron stands in his way. Cyron, who intended a military future for his stepson, Andr, the count of Montfort, blames Reisden for encouraging Andr's theatrical bent. Fascinated by death (for reasons Smith eventually reveals), Andr channels his dark thoughts into his work at the Grand Necropolitan Theatre, where he is driven to act out his obsessions. Though recently married, he ignores his seductive wife, Sabina, and accuses her of trying to poison him. While struggling to appease Cyron and help Andr, Reisden strives to satisfy his own wife, Perdita, a legally blind concert pianist who wants to resurrect her career with a trip to America, where she hopes to compel Reisden to come to terms with his past. When Andr and Cyron join forces to make a military film on the grounds of Montfort Castle in Arras, with Reisden's participation, Smith ratchets up the tension. In addition to providing fascinating background on early filmmaking, the author adds French military secrets, murder, blackmail and witchcraft. Though the buildup to the revelation of Reisden's dilemma seems unnecessarily complicated, readers will care about the splendidly realized characters, whose fates are decided in an eminently satisfying conclusion. Agent, Jane Otte. 3-city author tour. (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Smith completes her trilogy dealing with lives disrupted by the complexities of pre^-Word War I France. (The first two entries in the series, The Vanished Child [1992] and The Knowledge of Water [1996], were New York Times Notable Books.) This time she tells the story of a count who rejects a commission in the army in favor of running the smallest theater in Paris, specializing in works of the macabre. The count of Montfort's own life is filled with sinister melodrama. His beautiful, wealthy wife, he believes, is trying to murder him. His playhouse is filled with real-life plots, counterplots, suspicious accidents, and murder. The novel has a nineteenth-century feel to it, reminiscent of Dracula and The Phantom of the Opera in its gas-lit horrors. Although Smith takes the melodrama a bit over the top here, the story will appeal to fans of historical suspense. --Connie Fletcher
Kirkus Review
The conclusion to Smith's neo-Victorian trilogy (The Vanished Child, 1992; The Knowledge of Water, 1996) is a virtuosic fusion of speculative history, boldly stylized character drawing, and intricately plotted rousing melodrama. The action takes place in 1911 in Paris and the Flanders countryside (and, briefly, in America). Physician Alexander von Reisden, who heads the underfunded Jouvet medical research institute, is pressured to cure deeply disturbed AndrÉ du Monde, Count of Montfort and owner of (as well as writer-performer for) the Grand Necropolitan Theater, whose horrific productions seem extrusions of AndrÉ's own dark psyche--by the Count's wealthy stepfather Maurice Cyron, a potential contributor to France's desired military buildup in anticipation of a forthcoming German invasion. Complicated, n'est-ce pas ? Not really--at least until AndrÉ's ambitious production of Citizen Mabet, a Gallic silent film version of Macbeth, encounters various problems, leading its star, AndrÉ's wife Sabine (who dabbles in witchcraft and appears to have taken a demon lover), to agree only reluctantly to a scene involving a "working guillotine." Only a sadist on a par with a very executioner would reveal the subtly enfolded details of Smith's dazzling plot. Suffice it to say that it involves "the secret of Montfort" (the castle where filming occurs), persistent rumors (spread by Hungarian blackmailer Ferenc Gehazy) that the embattled Reisden (already known to us as a child murderer) may have been a German secret agent, and the multiple tensions that almost destroy Alexander's happy marriage to the trilogy's estimable heroine, blind concert pianist Perdita Halley--whose climactic outburst "oh, my goodness, Alexander, orgies and curses? It just isn't believable" understates the case beautifully. All is unraveled quite logically by the eye-popping resolution, which evokes fond memories of Poe, Agatha Christie, Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities, and Polanski's Chinatown, among other expertly assimilated influences. Fiction just doesn't get any more entertaining and satisfying than this. A bloody triumph. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Now that he and his concert pianist wife have a young son of their own, physician Alexander von Reisden wants more than ever to wipe out a past full of hidden identity, tangled relationships, and murder, but a dangerous blackmailer forces him to confront his demons and accept himself and a family relationship he has tried desperately to forget. The trouble starts when von Reisen is forced to take on the case of the deeply disturbed Andr du Monde, sponsor of the Grand Necropolitan Theater, whose ghoulish productions feature his young wife. Smith's concluding volume to her "Vanished Child" trilogy, set in a bellicose France on the brink of World War I, is a murky and sinister tangle of political and domestic intrigue, witchcraft, and murder. It will resonate more with readers familiar with The Vanished Child (LJ 2/1/92) and The Knowledge of Water (LJ 8/96), but it offers compelling reading for everyone. Highly recommended.DCynthia Johnson, Cary Memorial Lib., Lexington, MA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.