Book Detail |
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Reviews |
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Excerpt |
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Historical Notes |
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Gallery |
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Reading Group Discussion Questions |
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The task had taken shape thanks to the end of a war and the inconvenient way secrets had of bubbling to the surface. It went without saying that it was going to be difficult. But then murder always was…
London, 1817: Beneath a silent moon, a stranger steals into London, bound to complete a grim task that began in the shadows of the past….
On that same evening, amid the splendor of Glenister House, London’s haut ton celebrates, still flush with victory in the Napoleonic Wars. Among the revelers are Mélanie and Charles Fraser–he, a former spy connected to the most powerful families in Britain and she, his exquisite bride, who has charmed all of society.
That night, stunning revelations pull the couple back into the world of intrigue they thought they’d escaped, forcing them to untangle a web of lies that spans generations and threatens the fate of nations. But the truth is a deadly weapon that could lead to scandal, tragedy, and murder.
An assassination, a secret society, and the dangerous liasions of Charles’s own family lead the Frasers from the lamplit streets of the city to a castle on the Scottish coast. The stakes of this game are the lives of those Charles holds most dear and the trust of the enigmatic woman with whom he shares his name–and his bed.
Trade Paperback, May 2008
Avon A
ISBN-10: 0061473553
ISBN-13: 978-0061473555
includes new epilogue and fifteen new pages of letters between the characters
Earlier Editions |
Hardcover, March 18, 2003 |
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Paperback, December 30, 2003 |
UK Edition |
Hardcover, 3 March, 2003 |
Tracy Grant - Novelist 
April 13, 2008 at 6:00 am
Will you be touring for Beneath a Silent Moon?
April 13, 2008 at 10:13 pm
Hi Perla! So far it doesn’t look as though I’ll be touring. I’ll certainly do readings/signings if invited, but it tends to be harder with a reprint (for one thing I can’t drag all my friends and family to the event :-). If I do any events, I’ll definitely post about them on the site.
June 11, 2008 at 10:00 pm
I won this book in Veronica Wolff’s contest but I’ve yet to receive it. I’m looking forward to reading it and I can’t wait to get it. I’ve been harrassing the mailman asking if there is any package for me.
June 11, 2008 at 10:02 pm
Forgot to write that I might have use this book for my forums book club to discuss and reading group questions that you have posted are going to very hand to use when we schedule that reading.
June 12, 2008 at 4:32 pm
That’s great to hear you won “Beneath a Silent Moon” in Veronica’s contest, Phoebe! Veronica is a great friend and a fabulous writer. It would be super if you used the book in your book club forums! Let me know if I can help in any way–answer questions in advance, pop into the forum to answer questions, etc… I love the idea of my reading group questions being put to good use!
June 18, 2008 at 5:39 pm
I finally got the copy with your lovely inscription and autograph. I will read it as soon as I have some time and when I do I will tell you about the book club discussion. I you know anyone who has read your book and would like to discuss it you can direct them to the forum when I have the date step up.
June 18, 2008 at 6:09 pm
That’s great, Phoebe! So glad the book got there! Do let me know when you have the book club discussion your forum. I’ll put a link up from my site.
Hope you enjoy “Beneath a Silent Moon”!
August 7, 2008 at 3:10 pm
I loved both Daughter of the Game and Beneath the Silent Moon. I am waiting for a sequel. Will there be one?
August 8, 2008 at 5:02 am
Thanks so much for posting, Barbara! The next book in the series, “The Mask of Night,” is already written. It takes place in January 1820, two months after “Daughter of the Game”/”Secrets of a Lady.” Now I just need a publishing contract–I’m hoping to have news to report soon. I’m working on the fourth book in the series, which centers on Laura Dudley, Colin and Jessica’s governess (Laura is accused of murder and Charles and Mélanie work to clear her). In the “Books” section of my website, you’ll find links to detail pages both MASK and BOOK #4 and there are links to excerpts from MASK.
September 22, 2008 at 6:53 am
[…] won’t go into as much detail on Beneath a Silent Moon, because I know some people who read this blog and comment regularly haven’t read it yet. But […]
October 13, 2008 at 4:31 am
[…] no real historical characters actually have “screen time.” Castlereagh does appear in Beneath a Silent Moon, however. He has a key scene with Charles, and his presence influence shadows the […]
October 19, 2008 at 8:34 pm
[…] Beneath a Silent Moon on the other hand originally began in Scotland on the night of the murder. In fact, what was the original opening of the book is now the end of Chapter 13. At another point (still in the early stages of writing), the book opened with Charles and Mel arriving at Dunmykel. The plot changed and evolved and I realized I needed to start in London. Once I knew that, it made sense to start with the Glenister House ball. But I still wanted a darker opening. As soon as I thought that through, I wrote the scene with with the unnamed many sneaking into London. It took me a while to get there, but it now seems inevitable to me that the book begins there. […]
December 3, 2008 at 8:49 am
[…] about the plotting process? About the thinking that went into particular plot twists in Secrets or Beneath or other […]
December 21, 2008 at 3:15 am
[…] a series of short letters that show a glimpse into Charles, Mélanie, and the other characters from Beneath a Silent Moon, celebrating the holidays in […]
January 3, 2009 at 6:46 pm
[…] took place on New Year’s Eve. These letters touch on so many parent/child relationships (and Beneath a Silent Moon deals with so many of those relationships) that this seemed a good time to post a video clip on the […]
January 11, 2009 at 9:35 pm
[…] you convey time (Regency) and place (seamy London), and secrets, which are always tempting. For Beneath a Silent Moon, it’s closer to making me want to buy, but…seems to focus on Charles and less about Melanie, […]
January 19, 2009 at 4:33 am
[…] With history on the mind, I thought I would post a video clip about a very different sort of historical perspective, the historical context of Beneath a Silent Moon. […]
February 22, 2009 at 6:12 am
[…] like a woman who always wore earrings, which I think says a lot about both Mélanie and Roth. In Beneath a Silent Moon, Mélanie wears a shirt and breeches for a couple of nighttime adventures. I hadn’t planned […]
March 8, 2009 at 4:58 am
[…] a while back, don’t often verbalize their feelings. Neither says “I love you” in Beneath a Silent Moon, including in the final scene. Charles instead tells Mel he “needs her” which somehow […]
March 14, 2009 at 8:34 pm
[…] Beneath a Silent Moon began with wanting to explore Charles’s relationship with Kenneth Fraser and also with the life Charles might have had if he hadn’t married Mélanie (a life in many ways exemplified by Honoria Talbot). I talked about this in one of the video clips I recorded last summer: […]
March 30, 2009 at 12:23 am
[…] the jewel box world represented by the Esterhazy ball they’ve attended before the book opens. Beneath a Silent Moon, on the other hand, opens with the Glenister House ball. Inspired by a number of memorable book […]
April 11, 2009 at 7:12 pm
[…] of the fun things in writing Beneath a Silent Moon was that with more of the story taking place in the social world than in Secrets of a Lady, there […]
May 9, 2009 at 8:42 pm
[…] is a letter from Mélanie to Cecily Summer, Simon Tanner’s actress friend who appears in Beneath a Silent Moon. Cecily Summers is the only character so far to have appeared in both the Anthea Malcolm books and […]
May 31, 2009 at 2:54 am
[…] Lymond’s past scars, while they involve fictional plot twists, are rooted in the real historical event of the Scottish defeat at the Battle of Solway Moss. Damerel’s damage on the other hand is more personal–a love affair with a married woman, subsequent estrangement from his family, his father’s death in the midst of it. Both Lymond and Damerel are wonderful examples of the classic tortured hero. Both have a complex backstory, which I think is one of the keys to doing tortured characters well (there’s nothing more annoying than a character who’s tortured over a deep dark secret that seems commonplace when revealed). But while traditionally it’s the hero who’s suffered the most emotional damage, I’ve always liked heroines with emotional baggage. Barbara Childe, the edgy, self-destructive heroine from Heyer’s An Infamous Army, is a wonderful example of the type. So is Dorothy Sayers’s Harriet Vane. I know some readers find Harriet too prickly to be sympathetic, but she’s one of my favorite heroines, struggling to come to terms with the past (her lover’s murder, her own trial on charges of killing him) yet refusing to let herself be defined or defeated by it. Of course Peter Wimsey has scars of his own, rooted in historical events–shell shock from World War I. In one of my favorite scenes from Busman’s Honeymoon, it’s Harriet (who begins the series “sick of myself, body and soul”) who comforts Peter. That scene shows the hard-won balance they’ve achieved in their relationship. (That scene also inspired the last scene between Charles and Mel in Beneath a Silent Moon). […]
June 6, 2009 at 5:42 am
[…] about how each reader shapes the story they read. Though I deliberately wrote Secrets of a Lady and Beneath a Silent Moon so they could be read in either order, I think the reading experience is somewhat different […]
June 27, 2009 at 6:54 pm
[…] and story arc. For Secrets of a Lady it was Measure for Measure and Troilus & Cressida, for Beneath a Silent Moon it was […]
July 5, 2009 at 7:10 pm
[…] to romanticize it and at the same time much less comfortable with desire. As Mélanie says in Beneath a Silent Moon, “Lovemaking doesn’t always have to mean more than an exchange of pleasure. Surely there’s no […]
July 11, 2009 at 10:32 pm
[…] lyrics delineate character so brilliantly. As I’ve mentioned before, my starting place for Beneath a Silent Moon was the final scene between Charles and Mélanie. I had that in mind before I plotted the rest of […]
October 12, 2009 at 12:50 am
[…] Beneath a Silent Moon features another pair of brothers in Quen and Val. There’s a rivalry between them that their father has encouraged. Charles tells Mel about the boys trying to scale the Old Tower at Dunmykel when they were children. But I found as I wrote the book that, despite the fact that much of Val’s behavior is appalling, the relationship between the two brothers was more complex and had more affection in it than I had at first envisioned. Quen and Val’s relationship is also clouded by questions of legitimacy as the story progresses. I think that one of the reasons I write about legitimacy and illegitimacy in so many books is that so much of the social order among British aristocrats was build on birth. So that questions about legitimacy can strike at the very foundations of that world (foundations which Edgar, in particular, takes very seriously). […]
December 13, 2009 at 1:55 am
[…] writing the book. I love the Moonlight Sonata and I still associate it with Mel (she plays it in Beneath a Silent Moon, though I now know it wasn’t referred to as the Moonlight Sonata until later). But after […]
January 2, 2010 at 9:45 pm
[…] You may recall mentions of their time at the Congress of Vienna in both Secrets of a Lady and Beneath a Silent Moon (including references to a murder Charles investigated in Vienna). In The Dark Waltz, they are […]
February 8, 2010 at 1:11 am
[…] February 8, 2010 Playlist for Beneath a Silent Moon Posted by Tracy Grant under Beethoven, Beneath a Silent Moon, David & Simon, Dorothy Sayers, Merola Opera Program, Mélanie and Charles Fraser, Penelope Williamson, Secrets of a Lady, Simon Tanner, Stephen Sondheim Leave a Comment Following up on the playlist for Secrets of a Lady I posted a while ago, here’s a playlist for Beneath a Silent Moon: […]
February 28, 2010 at 7:23 am
[…] author photo. It’s the photo on my website and in Secrets of a Lady and the trade re-issue of Beneath a Silent Moon.. But it’s now five years old, so with Vienna Waltz coming out, I realized it was time for a […]
April 18, 2010 at 7:17 am
[…] Waltz. She was first mentioned in Secrets of a Lady . She actually appeared in my first draft of Beneath a Silent Moon but wound up on the cutting room floor in revisions. This seemed a good time to post a video clip […]
July 5, 2010 at 9:18 pm
[…] The interview and Pam’s post got me thinking about the wonderful texture and imagery in the lyrics to musicals and how so many of those songs inspire me as a writer. I love the way musical lyrics can distill emotion (reinforced when the words are put with the music). As I’ve blogged about, I get a lot of inspiration from classical music, but I also have moments in my books that are inspired by musical theater. When I saw the film version of Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd, I realized how “No Place Like London” echoes the mood and tone of the opening of Beneath a Silent Moon: […]
October 11, 2010 at 7:57 am
[…] a Comment I had a fascinating exchange this week on Facebook with a new reader who read Beneath a Silent Moon and now is reading Secrets of a Lady. I’m always intrigued by hearing from readers who read […]
October 26, 2010 at 6:26 am
[…] wonderful production directed by Libby Appel with Marco Barricelli as Hamlet), I was plotting Beneath a Silent Moon. I tend to pick one or two Shakespeare plays which influence each of my books, and Beneath was […]
November 8, 2010 at 4:48 am
[…] leaving Meg to go to prison (I’d still like to deal with Meg more in a subsequent book). In Beneath a Silent Moon, Evie also dies, killed by Tommy won escapes (definitely to be dealt with a in a future book). […]
March 6, 2011 at 9:28 pm
[…] with my parents at not-quite seven. Later I had the fun of spending two weeks there researching Beneath a Silent Moon. Even in my books that aren’t actually set in Scotland, Charles’s love of Scotland his […]
March 15, 2011 at 7:59 pm
[…] Beneath a Silent Moon, (which thematically is in many ways all about sex), Charles and Mélanie do make love fairly early […]
July 2, 2011 at 7:38 pm
[…] control over who she went to bed with than a married woman did in the early nineteenth century. In Beneath a Silent Moon, Mélanie/Suzanne says to […]
September 22, 2012 at 7:09 am
[…] revelations from different angles. The book is set in 1817 and parallels some events from both Beneath a Silent Moon and Secrets of a Lady. The plot that surrounds those revelations is very different – Colin […]
July 29, 2014 at 10:59 pm
[…] he himself has made than Charles was – that was actually starting to be the case for the Beneath a Silent Moon and The Mask of Night Charles. Charles is Daughter/Secrets didn’t even like to use the word spy. […]