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Book Review of Roots of Evil

Roots of Evil
reviewed on + 13 more book reviews


Lucy Trent is used to having the legend of her disreputable grandmother disinterred from time to time - the infamous silent-screen actress Lucretia von
Wolff, whose lovers were legion, whose scandals were numerous, whose life ended abruptly in a bizarre double murder and suicide at the Ashwood film studios
in 1952. Lucy rather enjoys Lucretia's legend - although most of the family would prefer it to be quietly forgotten. But when a body is found in the now-derelict
studios, brutalised in a macabre echo of the 50-year-old case, disturbing facts about the past begin to emerge...Facts which point back to the eerie legend
of the child known simply as Alraune. The child named after Lucretia's most famous film. The child who may never have existed at all. In the ensuing murder
investigation, Lucy is to discover the truth about her family's dark and often poignant history - a history which spans the glittering concert halls of
1920s Vienna to the bleak environs of wartime Auschwitz. And at the heart of it all lies the shocking truth about the mysterious child called Alraune.