Book Synopsis: In this, his latest and most exciting novel, Dr. Cronin turns to a son and his father, to a crime of passion and a crime of injustice, to a bond of loyalty that reached across fifteen years toward a man broken, brutalized and forgotten within prison walls.
Beyond This Place is drawn to the size of life, in full color. It is crowded with people and events. It is rich in emotion -- deep, durable, universal emotion. It gains added stature from the social importance of the theme. And it abounds in the qualities of drama and suspense, in the sweep and grandeur and warm human understanding that have characterized Dr. Cronin's work from Hatter's Castle to the present.
Paul Burgess was twenty--one, mature, level--headed, a successful student and a good son to his "widowed" mother. But an application for a summer teaching job -- an application which required a birth certificate -- put to an end the ordered calm of Paul's progress and turned his life into a nightmare.
For he learned that he, Paul Burgess, was in reality Paul Mathry, the son of Rees Mathry, a convicted murderer who was not only alive, but even then serving the fifteenth year of a life sentence.
Profoundly shaken, Paul left home and wandered -- drawn slowly, surely, to Stoneheath. And from the moment he saw those great forbidding walls, and realized fully that within them his father was buried alive, Paul Mathry became a man possessed.
If his father was guilty, why had he not been hanged? Was it possible that for fifteen years an innocent man had endured unspeakable degradation and mental torture?
Paul plunged into the past, immersed himself in the facts of the trial and lives of the witnesses. The closer he came to the truth, the more he was threatened and pressured from high places. The name Mathry had made him a marked man -- and he suffered.
At their own risk a few people befriended him, offered him help. One, above all, believed in him -- Lena Andersen -- grave, lovely Lena, whose own ordeal reassured him, whose unspoken love sustained him in his long, hectic, agonizing drive for justice and his father's freedom.
The impact of Beyond This Place is tremendous and readers will remember it vividly -- and with pleasure -- for a long time.
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