Robert Goddard - Caught in the Light

review by Brian Lowen on show 28th July
On assignment in Vienna, photographer Ian Jarrett falls in love with a woman he meets by chance, Marian Esguard. Back in England, he leaves his wife and goes to meet Marian, intending to run away with her, only for her to vanish from his life as mysteriously as she entered it.

Searching for the woman for whom he has sacrificed everything, Jarrett comes across a Dorset churchyard full of gravestones of dead Esguards. He also meets a psychotherapist, Daphne Sanger. She too is looking for someone: a former client who believes she is the reincarnation of Marian Esguard, who may have invented photography ten years before Fox Talbot in the early 1800s.
But why is Marian Esguard unknown to history?
And who and where is the woman Jarrett met in Vienna?

Jarrett sets out to solve a mystery whose origins lie amid the seemingly magical properties of early photography, but whose answer is most surprising, as the dead bodies pile up.

A really good detailed story of the type one can expect from Robert Goddard, especially interesting to those interested in the early origins of photography. The tension slowly builds up to the dramatic conclusion in the final chapters A lot of names in the story that requires good concentration to keep track of them all, but it does hold the interest of the reader.

Not a happy ending, but probably a more realistic one. Recommended.