Forever Past: Volume 3 in a Claire Clairmont Mystery Trilogy

Like the first two volumes in this trilogy dealing with the life of Claire Clairmont, I was requested to review this one by the publicist who is now MaryGlenn M. Warnock. Warnock mailed me a hardcover copy which I began reading on June 10, setting aside the book I was reading at the time.                                         

 For background on Claire Clairmont see my reviews of the previous two books in the trilogy.  My review of Claire's Last Secret can be found here , and my review of A Shadowed Fate is here.  

When I wrote the original version of this review, there was no cover for  Forever Past and the page for the novel on Goodreads was incomplete.  There is now a cover for this book which I am adding below.  

                                   

                                

Claire in continuing to try to discover what happened to her daughter, Allegra, whose father was the poet Lord Byron.  Byron was his title.  His actual name was George Gordon.  (See the Wikipedia article on Lord Byron here.) He recognized Allegra as his daughter.  So it seems to me that her name would have been Allegra Gordon.

Setting the issue of what her name should be aside, Byron was trying to protect Allegra from assassination due to her being his daughter.  He himself was continually dealing with such threats.  Her life would be safe if no one knew where she was.    

Byron's involvement in a radical secret society would seem likely to have been the reason behind the assassination threats.  Certainly, keeping Allegra far from his political activities would have had a protective effect. 

The thriller aspect of this book eventually comes to a climax.  Some readers would have found those developments surprising.  I was briefly surprised, but current politics caused me to realize that I shouldn't have been astonished at all. 

There was a happy ending for Claire in this novel. There had not been a happy ending for her in real life.  I did think that the alternate events described in this book were possible. I like happy endings when they aren't completely beyond the realm of possibility.   So I thought Forever Past  was credible.  I gave it a B.