The Desolate Garden
Danny Kemp
Paperback
(New Generation Publishing, Feb. 29, 2012)
The Desolate Garden is the story of a secret bank, which since its inauguration in the fourteenth century has been managed by only one family; the Paterson's, Earls of Harrogate and hereditary Lords of the Realm. In 1945 Lord Maudlin Paterson, sensing the winds of change offers the bank's services exclusively to the British Secret Intelligence Services, a move that ensures the bank will escape descending into the grasping clutches of Socialism.In 2012 Lord Elliot Paterson takes over the custodianship from his father and begins the task of converting the bank's hand-written ledgers into digital form. He discovers a hidden ledger, dated 1936, from which a vast quantity of money starts to disappear from the accounts. He digs deeper into the mystery, and comes across some initials along with an address in Leningrad, in Stalin's Soviet Russia. Elliot suspects that his grandfather, Lord Maudlin, was funding a Russia spy. He telephones his eldest son, Harry, to pass on the fears behind his suspicions.The novel opens with Lord Elliot's murder. His son, Lord Harry Paterson - forty-two, single, a dandy living on the Harrogate estate, and long recruited into the secret world after his service in the army, is summoned to London where he meets Judith Meadows, an attractive, but otherwise stick-figure of a woman, in the world-famous Martini bar at Duke's Hotel in London's St James's. Meadows plays him for the rake that he is before destroying his hopes of bliss when she discloses that she works for the Home Office and is to be his case officer assigned to unravel the mysterious murder. As the story unfolds, the relationship between the two, both sexually and intellectually, ricochets back and forth like a train driven by a teenager, stuck in first gear. Lord Harry knows more than he is willing to reveal, and Meadows knows more about his family than Lord Harry realises.