The King's General

ONE OF Miss du Maurier's most engaging talents is her ability to incorporate here the best features of her previous books without once repeating herself. THE KING'S GENERAL has much of the depth of Hungry Hill, some of the suspense of Rebecca, a little of the swashbuckling of Frenchman's Creek, but is nothing like any of them. Menabilly stands bare and desolate on the Cornish coast, its ivy-covered walls hiding the secret which two people will carry to their graves; Honor Harris, so injured as a girl that she never walked again, and Sir Richard Grenvile, the King's General in the West, resentful, proud, bitter to the end. The only man Honor ever loved. She saw him for the first time on the night of her eighteenth birthday at the Duke of Buckingham's ball. Richard was already a veteran of foreign wars and on his way to fame and power. She bade him a final farewell years later when, his cause lost and Menabilly surrounded by the forces of the enemy, he vanished through a secret passage from her life. To tell more of the story here would be unfair. Only Miss du Maurier is able to do justice to the hairbreadth escapes and exciting events which punctuate this tale of three hundred years ago, told as if it happened yesterday.