The Sins of the Father

Last year, I read and reviewed Only Time Will Tell, the first book in The Clifton Chronicles, Jeffrey Archer’s sweeping family saga. That novel concluded with a cliffhanger, as one would expect from the first of five books in a series, with Harry Clifton arriving in the U.S. using the name Tom Bradshaw, and finding himself under arrest for murder.

The Sins of the Father picks up where Only Time Will Tell left off, but unlike the first book, covers only a few years of the lives of Harry, his friends and his family as they are separated and reunited. Tricked by a slimy New York lawyer and determined to keep the truth from his family, Harry accepts his fate and makes the best of his time in prison, befriending an Irish thief and getting a job in the prison library. From there we move away from Harry to his mother, Maisie, who is sought after by no less than 3 different men, and fiancee, Emma, who refuses to believe that Harry is dead and travels to New York to find out the truth. Harry’s best friend Giles joins the army and is captured by the Germans before escaping and returning to England, and Giles’s father Hugo brings the family company and himself to the brink of ruin. We don’t return to Harry until the end of the novel, when he also returns to England, to find out that due to the confusing and complicated rules of English title inheritance, and the inability to prove that he is not Hugo’s son, that he and not Giles may be the one to inherit Hugo’s title and estate.

The Sins of the Father is more linear than Only Time Will Tell; since the main characters do not spend nearly as much time together, we don’t get the different points of view we were provided in the first novel. The cliffhanger also has less of an impact than the first novel’s, and I hope that whatever is being set up for the next novel is worth the wait.

While the events of The Sins of the Father are essentially standalone, references to events and people from Harry’s past would not be understood by one who had not read the first novel. For that reason I would recommend this second in the series only to those who have read the first.

Notes on the audiobook:  This second novel is narrated by Emelia Fox, who did the female voices in the first book, and Alex Jennings, who replaces the previous male narrator. My only nit for both of them, both British, is their American accents left a lot to be desired, but I’m sure Brits say the same thing about Americans doing their accent! Running time is 10 hours on 8 CDs, copyright 2012 by Macmillan Audio.