num_pages: 485
description: Interweaving real and fictional elements, The American Boy is a major new literary historical crime novel in the tradition of An Instance of the Fingerpost and Possession. England 1819: Thomas Shield, a new master at a school just outside London, is tutor to a young American boy and the boy's sensitive best friend, Charles Frant. Drawn to Frant's beautiful, unhappy mother, Thomas becomes caught up in her family's twisted intrigues. Then a brutal crime is committed, with consequences that threaten to destroy Thomas and all that he has come to hold dear. Despite his efforts, Shield is caught up in a deadly tangle of sex, money, murder and lies -- a tangle that grips him tighter even as he tries to escape from it. And what of the strange American child, at the heart of these macabre events, yet mysterious -- what is the secret of the boy named Edgar Allen Poe?
language: English
title: The American Boy
titlecomplete: The American Boy
characters: Edgar Allan Poe
genres: Mystery, Fiction, Thriller, Gothic, British Literature, Crime, Historical, Historical Fiction, Historical Mystery, Audiobook
ratings_count: 3301
awards: awardedAt: 1072944000000
name: Barry Award
category: Best British Crime Novel, awardedAt: 1104566400000
name: Audie Award
category: Literary Fiction, awardedAt: 1104566400000
name: Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year
publisher: HarperCollins Publishers