Oliver twists the plot
Frederick Forsyth
LEGACY Legacy is Murray Smith's fourth thriller- novel, he having come late to the novelist's game after years as a successful screen- and script-writer. Prior to that he appears to have spent some time visiting condign discouragement on Britain's foreign ill- wishers in various unlit alleyways.
In his first three books he drew upon these earlier years to pen some powerfully authentic stuff about the international criminal and terrorist underworld and its opponents in British and American intelli- gence. With Legacy he leaves all that behind to describe the world of big busi- ness and computer electronics, mixed with some fairly serious skulduggery and his much-loved American cops. The basic plot is simple but ingenious.
When Jack Fitzrowan, Irish-born baronet turned Bostonian industrialist, dies in a tragic yachting accident his will leaves two surprises. The first is that a massive co-deal with a Japanese electronics giant just before he dies means that his estate is vast- ly foreseen. Thus, after the main bequests, the 'residue' is bigger than the rest put together.
More intriguingly, he reveals that as a teenager in Ireland he experienced the love of his life with a servant girl and sired a son. The disgraced maid was sped into the Catholic church's discreet adoption proce- dures, the errant buck shipped to America where he made his fortune. But he never forgot the maid and her son, and he never found them. So he leaves a bounty; the finder of his long-lost son will receive a huge reward, and the missing bastard Oliv- er the balance of the estate.
All of which gives someone a hell of an incentive to find the young man, and the legitimate heirs an even better reason to ensure that he is found dead. Now read on, as they say in the weekly serials. A prosaic manhunt story with some nice detective work thrown in, the usual blind alleys, geriatric Irish nuns who may remem- ber something about their times in an ille- gitimate-pregnancy home that supposedly never existed — that is what one might expect.
But Fitzrowan left behind a pretty fear- some brood by his only marriage and some senior executives who would have your col- lops on a dark night if the price was right. So the plot thickens and twists, with a Boston cop married to one of the daugh- ters, a stuffy Dublin lawyer who turns out to have memorised the Kama Sutra and needs but the chance to try it all out, and a Boston-based Mafia hit-man with an agen- da of his own.
By halfway through, we are pretty cer- tain we have met Oliver Fitzrowan in his new post-adoption persona, and we'd be right. The season of far-away holidays, sun- loungers under the awning and Pinot Grigio by the pool is almost upon us. One needs something to read, anything to keep the eyes off the bronzed Aphrodites one isn't married to.
But a word of caution about Legacy. One needs patience. It takes time to learn to put it down.
Previous page
