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Found Wanting

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The car jolts to a halt at the pavement’s edge, the driver waving through the windscreen to attract Richard’s attention. He starts with astonishment. The driver is Gemma, his ex-wife.
He has not seen or spoken to her for several years. They have, she memorably assured him the last time they met, nothing to say to each other. But something has changed her mind - something urgent…
The shape of this book came to me, clearly and insistently, while I was sitting outside a café in Stockholm in November 2006. It involved a journey that starts on page one and continues until the end, with no turnings back. The Scandinavian setting for much of that journey was also clear from the start. That led me to develop an idea based on a longstanding curiosity about the strange case of Princess Anastasia, youngest of the last Tsar’s daughters, and the persistent legend that she survived the massacre at Ekaterinburg in July 1918. The current scientific consensus is that we have proved, thanks to the wonders of DNA analysis, that she did not survive and perished in with the rest of her family. That has not convinced everyone, however. There are still many who believe the woman known as Anna Anderson, who long claimed to be Anastasia, was the genuine article. They cite her knowledge of matters only Anastasia could have been aware of, a toe disorder she shared with the princess, her aristocratic bearing and her acknowledgement as Anastasia by several close relatives.
Her identification by doubters as a Polish farm girl called Franziska Schanzkowska has always been problematical, despite DNA apparently linking Anna Anderson to one of Franziska’s half-sisters. There has been suspicion of dirty tricks surrounding much of the evidence in this tangled case ever since Anna Anderson came forward. It will probably never go away while the fate of the Romanovs remains such a sensitive political issue.
It is into the fabric of this historical mystery that I wove the plot of Found Wanting. I didn’t need to invent any of the truly weird circumstances surrounding Anastasia and her short (or perhaps long) life. The truth is much stranger than any fiction. How it might affect people in the present day, perhaps fatally, is the theme of the story, unfolding as it does over two tumultuous weeks as Richard Eusden, the central character, chases answers - and the key to his own survival - from London to a forest in Finland. Anastasia visited England just once, when the imperial family attended the Cowes regatta in August 1909. Could some piece of evidence have survived from her visit that would settle Anna Anderson’s claim to be her one way or the other for good and all - a piece of evidence more clinching even than DNA? Read the book and you’ll find out.
'Sure to have the reader unable to leave the armchair until every page has been turned. A fantastically engaging read.'
Waterstones Books Quarterly
'Goddard writes and plots with accurate, correct precision; you feel he knows every setting and was witness to every scene'
Literary Review
'Fast-paced and full of twists, it's an involving page-turner'
Choice
'This is pulse-racing stuff, delivered with all the panache that we have come to expect from Goddard'
Good Book Guide