Scrambler

Into Keldale's pastoral web of old houses and older secrets comes Scotland Yard Inspector Thomas Lynley, the eighth earl of Asherton. Along with the redoubtable Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers, Lynley has been sent to solve a savage murder that has stunned the peaceful countryside. For fat, unlovely Roberta Teys has been found in her best dress, an ax in her lap, seated in the old stone barn beside her father's headless corpse. Her first and last words were "I did it. And I'm not sorry".

This fascinating audiobook is the first volume in a projected cultural history of the United States, from the earliest English settlements to our own time. It is a history of American folkways as they have changed through time, and it argues a thesis about the importance for the United States of having been British in its cultural origins. While most people in the United States today have no British ancestors, they have assimilated regional cultures which were created by British colonists, even while preserving ethnic identities at the same time.

On Prince Edward Island, aging siblings Mathew and Marilla Cuthbert decide to adopt a boy to help with chores around the farm. But when Mathew arrives at the train platform, the only living creature in sight, legs dangling from the piles of shingles where she sits, is a freckled, green-eyed, redheaded little girl. Mathew senses immediately that life at Green Gables is going to be very different. And how right he is.