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| Past Caring | 
| Author: Robert Goddard
Publisher: Delta
Category: Book
List Price: $12.00
Buy New: $4.95
You Save: $7.05 (59%)
New (34) from $4.95
Avg. Customer Rating:  13 reviews
Sales Rank: 24924
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 528
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 8 x 5.2 x 1.2
ISBN: 0385341172
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.914
EAN: 9780385341172
ASIN: 0385341172
Publication Date: May 20, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: BRAND NEW PAPERBACK BOOK IN EXCELLENT CONDITION, NEXT DAY SHIPPING, PADDED ENVELOPES
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Product Description
At a lush villa on the sun-soaked island of Madeira, Martin Radford is given a second chance. His life ruined by scandal, Martin holds in his hands the leather-bound journal of another ruined man, former British cabinet minister Edwin Strafford. What’s more, Martin is being offered a job—to return to England and investigate the rise and fall of Strafford, an ambitious young politician whose downfall, in 1910, is as mysterious as the strange deaths that still haunt his family.
Martin is intrigued by Strafford’s story, by the man’s overwhelming love for a beautiful suffragette, by her inexplicable rejection of him and their love affair’s political repercussions. But as he retraces Strafford’s ruination, Martin realizes that Strafford did not fall by chance; he was pushed. Suddenly Martin, who has not cared for many people in his life, cares desperately—about a man’s mysterious death and a family’s terrible secret, about a love beyond reckoning and betrayal beyond imagining. Most of all Martin cares because the story he is uncovering is not yet over—and among the men and women still caught in its web, Martin himself may be the most vulnerable of all….
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| Customer Reviews: Read 8 more reviews...
 reprint of a deep English historical thriller May 24, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
In 1977 Madeira, thirty year old wannabe but failed historian Martin Radford has an opportunity to redeem his name instead of wasting his talent and education as he has so far. Leo Sellick selects him to look into the disturbing life of the late Home Secretary Edwin Strafford, whose meteoric rise foretold a great political future that collapsed even faster in 1910 after only two years in the cabinet. Sellick wants to learn why Strafford failed so rapidly that he moved to Madeira to hide and why Prime Minister George named him consul there to live and die in obscurity.
Martin obtains Strafford's journal that implies there is much more to the abrupt resignation from the cabinet of George's predecessor Asquith and Parliament of a rising political superstar. Instead Strafford seems to implicate some great figures of the Edwardian Era just prior to WW I with ethical crimes and even murder to conceal their corruption and the young politico embroiled in a love affair only to have the woman he cherished Elizabeth Latimer reject him. Martin's research brings him looking at his own family while he ponders whether a peer Mr. Coachman wanted to destroy Strafford and if so why. Stranger yet someone wants Radford to drop his study and that unknown person is willing to kill to insure the secrets of six and a half decades ago remain buried because they have major implications on those in power today.
Starting with its aptly named title, PAST CARING is a reprint of a deep English historical thriller that uses a fascinating twist of historiography enabling the audience to compare the modern day (1977) historian with the Edwardian figure he is studying. Fans who appreciate a taut tale will enjoy past and present as betrayal in love and politics is a theme both generations distastefully swallow.
Harriet Klausner
 One of Robert Goddard's best October 28, 2007
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
Martin Redford is an unemployed and divorced ex-schoolteacher of foundered promise and dismal prospect. So when Alec Fowler suggests that Martin comes to visit him on the island of Madeira with the promise of a prospective job offered by his South African friend Leo Sellick, he eagerly accepts.
It turns out that when Sellick became the owner of his house, the Quinta do Porto Novo, he came across a manuscript written by its previous owner, Edwin Strafford. Strafford had been appointed Home Secretary in 1908 at the age of thirty-two. Why did he resign two years later without explanation before becoming British Consul on Madeira? Why was he abruptly rejected by his fiancee, suffragette Elizabeth Latimer? Who or what betrayed Edwin Strafford in 1910? It is going to be a twisty path for Martin Redford, now Leo Sellick's employee, to find the answers to these questions and many others.
A good plot and a sound historical background are the qualities of this entertaining adventure story. Paul Shelley is the excellent reader of this novel for BBC Audiobooks.
Brilliant September 2, 2004
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
Goddard's first novel and perhaps his best - although his "In Pale Battalions" is also excellent. If you like a good "mystery in the past" novel this is it. Highly recommended.
Sherlock Holmes stuff! April 1, 2004
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
Martin Radford, an out of work, disgraced historian, is hired by a millionaire businessman to fly to the island of Madiera where he is filled in with the story of an Edwardian Cabinet Minister, Edwin Strafford, who suddenly resigned from Parliament at the height of his career, and retired to the house in Madiera where the businessman now lives.Martin's brief is to find out exactly why Edwin resigned and all the circumstances surrounding his withdrawal from Society plus the breaking of his engagement. The trail leads him to a university where he is seduced like a gullible teenager, by an attractive young professor with an agenda of her own. The story is filled with devious twists and turns, covering past crimes which lead to modern day crimes. It's a long and very involved story which needs full concentration to appreciate it for the fine work that it is.
The First, but still the best from Robert Goddard January 5, 2002
3 out of 4 found this review helpful
This book is unmissable. Idiscovered it shortly after it was first published and it was unbelievable. I've since read all of his, some brilliant, all good, but this remains the best.
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