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Face Of An Angel
She was haunted by what she had seen in a decaying mansion in Italy...
As soon as Meg arrived in Frenchley, a sixth sense told her to run.
Five years before, while touring Italy, Meg stumbled on an ancient villa near Florence. Curiosity had prompted her to accept an invitation to tea from the two inhabitants -- the beautiful, lonely Angelica and her grandmother.
Now that same curiosity drove Meg to see Angelica once more. Her search led her to an old house in a seemingly peaceful hamlet -- a house where the evil and decay lay hidden behind its graceful facade -- a house where violence and sudden death were not strangers.
As soon as Meg arrived in Frenchley, a sixth sense told her to run.
Five years before, while touring Italy, Meg stumbled on an ancient villa near Florence. Curiosity had prompted her to accept an invitation to tea from the two inhabitants -- the beautiful, lonely Angelica and her grandmother.
Now that same curiosity drove Meg to see Angelica once more. Her search led her to an old house in a seemingly peaceful hamlet -- a house where the evil and decay lay hidden behind its graceful facade -- a house where violence and sudden death were not strangers.
183 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published January 1, 1961
2 people are currently reading
116 people want to read
About the author
Dorothy Eden
95 books167 followersAka Mary Paradise.
Dorothy Eden was born in 1912 in New Zealand and died in 1982. She moved to England in 1954 after taking a trip around the world and falling in love with the country. She was best known for her many mystery and romance books as well as short stories that were published in periodicals. As a novelist, Dorothy Eden was renowned for her ability to create fear and suspense. This earned her many devoted readers throughout her lifetime.
Dorothy Eden was born in 1912 in New Zealand and died in 1982. She moved to England in 1954 after taking a trip around the world and falling in love with the country. She was best known for her many mystery and romance books as well as short stories that were published in periodicals. As a novelist, Dorothy Eden was renowned for her ability to create fear and suspense. This earned her many devoted readers throughout her lifetime.
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
August 29, 2014
While classified as a Gothic, this isn't one in the true sense. There's no windswept moors, no dilapidated mansion, no creepy housekeeper. Really, this is just a good solid mystery, Hitchcock style.
The suspense here builds slowly which in a way is more suspenseful because we are as naive as the heroine. There's no foreboding to warn you of what's coming. And while this is a totally different story, it reminded me in parts of Vincent Price's "House of Wax" and "Psycho". (but don't expect to be scared out of your wits, its not like that)
A young woman, unlucky in love, goes to an art exhibit and attracts the attention of the art dealer and his friend, a foreign painter, who says she has "the face of an angel". Soon, the art dealer, Clive, convinces Meg to go with him to the country and be his secretary. His friend, the artist, insists she also come regularly to sit for him so he can paint her, although he is a terrible artist. ( Incidently, Hans the artist lives nearby with an old recluse of a housekeeper and her cat).
Clive (the art dealer) is married, though we don't see his wife straight away as she's been in the hospital for an extended stay, recovering from an auto accident that has destroyed her face...
There's also a pretty young librarian who is in love with Hans although somewhat frightened of him. She also sits for Hans until one day she doesn't show up for her job...
And there's Simon Sommers, who runs an antique shop and periodically sells Clive paintings. He has taken a shine to Meg and keeps tab on her, always nagging her to spend time with him and flirting shamelessly. I quite liked his character.
I really enjoyed this and thought it was well thought out. While we suspect which characters arent all that they seem to be, we don't know WHY or whats going to happen until it all comes together at the end. At least I never guessed anything. Well worth a read!
CONTENT: G
The suspense here builds slowly which in a way is more suspenseful because we are as naive as the heroine. There's no foreboding to warn you of what's coming. And while this is a totally different story, it reminded me in parts of Vincent Price's "House of Wax" and "Psycho". (but don't expect to be scared out of your wits, its not like that)
A young woman, unlucky in love, goes to an art exhibit and attracts the attention of the art dealer and his friend, a foreign painter, who says she has "the face of an angel". Soon, the art dealer, Clive, convinces Meg to go with him to the country and be his secretary. His friend, the artist, insists she also come regularly to sit for him so he can paint her, although he is a terrible artist. ( Incidently, Hans the artist lives nearby with an old recluse of a housekeeper and her cat).
Clive (the art dealer) is married, though we don't see his wife straight away as she's been in the hospital for an extended stay, recovering from an auto accident that has destroyed her face...
There's also a pretty young librarian who is in love with Hans although somewhat frightened of him. She also sits for Hans until one day she doesn't show up for her job...
And there's Simon Sommers, who runs an antique shop and periodically sells Clive paintings. He has taken a shine to Meg and keeps tab on her, always nagging her to spend time with him and flirting shamelessly. I quite liked his character.
I really enjoyed this and thought it was well thought out. While we suspect which characters arent all that they seem to be, we don't know WHY or whats going to happen until it all comes together at the end. At least I never guessed anything. Well worth a read!
CONTENT: G
March 20, 2015
This was even better than Bride by Candlelight. Bride by Candlelight had more atmosphere, but this book had plot aplenty. In Face of and Angel. Meg is a heroine who's all ready to jump into a mystery and free herself from staid boredom. Clive, an Art dealer and Hans who attempts to paint and fails sadly, seem to offer her the perfect retreat as secretary and model, even if Simon the junk dealer comes with the deal. Better then all that, Meg hopes to find that Clive's wife Luisa is really Angelica...
I really love the mystery this book hid, I didn't figure it out till the end, and then wondered why I hadn't seen it sooner. Mix in eccentric characters, a beautiful face scarred by an accident and a strange ogre of a person who doesn't let you see inside him and you'll have a wonderful spooky-ish mystery with cast of characters you won't forget fast.
The ending left me completely satisfied and ready to read another Dorothy Eden.
G rating
February 22, 2019
Walt Disney was quoted as saying:
“When you’re curious, you find lots of interesting things to do.”
In my opinion, Walt’s quote aptly described the personality and experiences of Meg, who is Dorothy Daniel’s protagonist in “Face of an Angel.” Meg is curious for sure, and as a result, she encounters more than her fair share of interesting opportunities and encounters.
In the opening pages of the story we learn that Englishwoman Margaret “Meg” Burney is on vacation in Italy, more specifically, she’s exploring a derelict villa located just outside Florence. We understand that Meg is not here by chance, but rather she’s retracing her steps from five years before. She’s nostalgic about her previous time in this place, one that happened by chance that first time. She’d stumbled onto the villa, and met the aged grandmother and her granddaughter, named Angelica.
The villa had been badly damaged by the war, but when Meg was first here, there were still a few inhabitable rooms. Those very rooms were the home of Angelica and her grandmother. At that time Meg was nineteen years old, Angelica was sixteen. It turned out that Angelica’s English was poor, but her grandmother interpreted, and soon they all become friendly and Meg was invited to stay with them for the evening.
As Meg became acquainted with the two ladies, she realized that the grandmother was intent on arranging a favorable marriage match for her granddaughter. It seemed to Meg that this would be a relatively easy task, considering what a lovely personality Angelica had, not to mention, “her handsome oval face, smooth dark hair and beautifully slender body.”
But in those early post war years, there were fewer promising marital prospects, and as a result, the grandmother’s worry for Angelica increased by the day.
Fast forward five years, Meg ventures back to the villa and quickly learns that it is no longer inhabitable. Apparently, it had been struck by lightning a few years before and was completely destroyed. While she is surveying the ruins of the building an elderly man approaches her, asking if he can be of assistance. Meg inquiries about the grandmother and Angelica. The man informs her that the grandmother has passed, but Angelica had married a few years before, to a wealthy Englishman, an art collector named Claudius Wilton. The man can supply no further details as to the couple’s whereabouts.
Back in England, Meg remains curious. She can’t seem to get Angelica off her mind. There is something about that storied day of five years past that she can’t shake off. So, she looks up the Wilton surname in the directory and finds no residential listings under that name, but there is one business named Wilton Galleries on Grosvenor Street. It was just about this time that we meet Meg’s on again, off again boyfriend Derek Moore. It just so happens that he has an admission ticket for an art exhibit at the very same Wilton Galleries!
Meg is amazed by the coin incidence, and decides that even though Derek can’t join her, she would be pleased if he could mail her the ticket. She tells Derek about Angelica, the girl she always thought of as the “Italian contessa” – the more she thought about Angelica the more determined she became that she must find her again. She strongly suspected that the Wilton Galleries might offer her a clue as to Angelica’s current life.
The day of the Wilton Galleries Art Exhibit arrives, and Meg peruses the crowd and not the paintings. She’s spotted by Hans Cromer, who is so besotted by her beauty that he introduces her to his old friend…none other than the gallery owner, Mr. Wilton himself.
“I think I may know your wife,” Meg informs him. She tells him about Angelica from Florence and is puzzled by Mr. Wilton’s (first name Clive), consternation.
Clive soon recovers his veneer of composure and then coolly informs Meg that he is married to a Luisa from Rome, not an Angelica from Florence. Clive excuses himself and Meg decides it’s time to leave. She enters the cloakroom, retrieves her coat, then reenters the main gallery, only to take one last look at Clive and Hans, engaged in what appears to be a rather clandestine looking conversation.
Meg proceeds out the galleries’ front entrance, and is offered a “cab share” with a mysterious younger man named Simon Somers. Simon is polite, so she agrees to share a cab with him. It is during the ride that Simon reveals that he, Hans and Clive all hail from the same town, Frenchley, on the Kent coast. Meg asks about Clive’s wife and Simon admits that he’s never met her; he only knows that she had an unfortunate accident shortly after their wedding, and she’s been in the hospital ever since. Simon let’s Meg know that Hans is a closer friend of Clive’s and as a result he’s probably met his wife.
Simon then offers Meg a warning that she should steer clear of Clive, due to the fact that “he’s like playing with a live electric wire.” Meg asks Simon what he meant by that, and he doesn’t wish to expand on it. This is all becoming too strange for Meg, and on top of it, she begins feeling that things are becoming a bit to “close” in the back of the cab for her comfort. It is then that Simon offers to take her to dinner, an offer she politely refuses. They part ways.
The next day, Derek calls Meg, informing her that Clive had called the previous evening, and that he was asking about her. “I gave him your number, you should expect a call from him soon” he says with a bit of a sarcastic tone of voice. A short time later, Clive calls Meg and tells her that he’s been looking for someone like her for a long time and that he has a business proposition for her.
They agree to meet at “Chateau Bleu” the following Wednesday.
From this point on, this story begins to take on a rather incredible number of twists and turns that at first blush, could easily be misinterpreted as little more than a miscellaneous collection of rather fantastic situations, including a abecedarian portrait painter, an mysterious absentee housekeeper, a lovesick librarian, an imprisoned wife and a rather bizarre storyline about a dressmaker’s dummy found in a ditch. The story’s overall intrigue is heightened by the telling of the “shadowy” dealings among collectors in the world of fine art.
Every one of the 183 pages of Dorothy Eden’s “Face of an Angel” had the power to pull me along, and it all ended way too quickly! In my opinion, the only aspect of this story that prevented it from a five star rating was that it felt as though it was about fifty pages too short. I would have liked to see just a bit more description of Han’s sinister, shadowy house and his paint gallery. There was also a place Daniels describes as “the strip of wasteland that’s marked dangerous because of unexploded mines” where some rather black hearted dealings go down. She could’ve spent a few more paragraphs on that ominous location.
But overall, I highly recommend “Face of an Angel!”
“When you’re curious, you find lots of interesting things to do.”
In my opinion, Walt’s quote aptly described the personality and experiences of Meg, who is Dorothy Daniel’s protagonist in “Face of an Angel.” Meg is curious for sure, and as a result, she encounters more than her fair share of interesting opportunities and encounters.
In the opening pages of the story we learn that Englishwoman Margaret “Meg” Burney is on vacation in Italy, more specifically, she’s exploring a derelict villa located just outside Florence. We understand that Meg is not here by chance, but rather she’s retracing her steps from five years before. She’s nostalgic about her previous time in this place, one that happened by chance that first time. She’d stumbled onto the villa, and met the aged grandmother and her granddaughter, named Angelica.
The villa had been badly damaged by the war, but when Meg was first here, there were still a few inhabitable rooms. Those very rooms were the home of Angelica and her grandmother. At that time Meg was nineteen years old, Angelica was sixteen. It turned out that Angelica’s English was poor, but her grandmother interpreted, and soon they all become friendly and Meg was invited to stay with them for the evening.
As Meg became acquainted with the two ladies, she realized that the grandmother was intent on arranging a favorable marriage match for her granddaughter. It seemed to Meg that this would be a relatively easy task, considering what a lovely personality Angelica had, not to mention, “her handsome oval face, smooth dark hair and beautifully slender body.”
But in those early post war years, there were fewer promising marital prospects, and as a result, the grandmother’s worry for Angelica increased by the day.
Fast forward five years, Meg ventures back to the villa and quickly learns that it is no longer inhabitable. Apparently, it had been struck by lightning a few years before and was completely destroyed. While she is surveying the ruins of the building an elderly man approaches her, asking if he can be of assistance. Meg inquiries about the grandmother and Angelica. The man informs her that the grandmother has passed, but Angelica had married a few years before, to a wealthy Englishman, an art collector named Claudius Wilton. The man can supply no further details as to the couple’s whereabouts.
Back in England, Meg remains curious. She can’t seem to get Angelica off her mind. There is something about that storied day of five years past that she can’t shake off. So, she looks up the Wilton surname in the directory and finds no residential listings under that name, but there is one business named Wilton Galleries on Grosvenor Street. It was just about this time that we meet Meg’s on again, off again boyfriend Derek Moore. It just so happens that he has an admission ticket for an art exhibit at the very same Wilton Galleries!
Meg is amazed by the coin incidence, and decides that even though Derek can’t join her, she would be pleased if he could mail her the ticket. She tells Derek about Angelica, the girl she always thought of as the “Italian contessa” – the more she thought about Angelica the more determined she became that she must find her again. She strongly suspected that the Wilton Galleries might offer her a clue as to Angelica’s current life.
The day of the Wilton Galleries Art Exhibit arrives, and Meg peruses the crowd and not the paintings. She’s spotted by Hans Cromer, who is so besotted by her beauty that he introduces her to his old friend…none other than the gallery owner, Mr. Wilton himself.
“I think I may know your wife,” Meg informs him. She tells him about Angelica from Florence and is puzzled by Mr. Wilton’s (first name Clive), consternation.
Clive soon recovers his veneer of composure and then coolly informs Meg that he is married to a Luisa from Rome, not an Angelica from Florence. Clive excuses himself and Meg decides it’s time to leave. She enters the cloakroom, retrieves her coat, then reenters the main gallery, only to take one last look at Clive and Hans, engaged in what appears to be a rather clandestine looking conversation.
Meg proceeds out the galleries’ front entrance, and is offered a “cab share” with a mysterious younger man named Simon Somers. Simon is polite, so she agrees to share a cab with him. It is during the ride that Simon reveals that he, Hans and Clive all hail from the same town, Frenchley, on the Kent coast. Meg asks about Clive’s wife and Simon admits that he’s never met her; he only knows that she had an unfortunate accident shortly after their wedding, and she’s been in the hospital ever since. Simon let’s Meg know that Hans is a closer friend of Clive’s and as a result he’s probably met his wife.
Simon then offers Meg a warning that she should steer clear of Clive, due to the fact that “he’s like playing with a live electric wire.” Meg asks Simon what he meant by that, and he doesn’t wish to expand on it. This is all becoming too strange for Meg, and on top of it, she begins feeling that things are becoming a bit to “close” in the back of the cab for her comfort. It is then that Simon offers to take her to dinner, an offer she politely refuses. They part ways.
The next day, Derek calls Meg, informing her that Clive had called the previous evening, and that he was asking about her. “I gave him your number, you should expect a call from him soon” he says with a bit of a sarcastic tone of voice. A short time later, Clive calls Meg and tells her that he’s been looking for someone like her for a long time and that he has a business proposition for her.
They agree to meet at “Chateau Bleu” the following Wednesday.
From this point on, this story begins to take on a rather incredible number of twists and turns that at first blush, could easily be misinterpreted as little more than a miscellaneous collection of rather fantastic situations, including a abecedarian portrait painter, an mysterious absentee housekeeper, a lovesick librarian, an imprisoned wife and a rather bizarre storyline about a dressmaker’s dummy found in a ditch. The story’s overall intrigue is heightened by the telling of the “shadowy” dealings among collectors in the world of fine art.
Every one of the 183 pages of Dorothy Eden’s “Face of an Angel” had the power to pull me along, and it all ended way too quickly! In my opinion, the only aspect of this story that prevented it from a five star rating was that it felt as though it was about fifty pages too short. I would have liked to see just a bit more description of Han’s sinister, shadowy house and his paint gallery. There was also a place Daniels describes as “the strip of wasteland that’s marked dangerous because of unexploded mines” where some rather black hearted dealings go down. She could’ve spent a few more paragraphs on that ominous location.
But overall, I highly recommend “Face of an Angel!”
December 22, 2012
This is my second book by this author and i have loved her since. The books was written by mary Paradise and i did not know at that time she was also dorothy eden. This one is a truly wonderful mystery.The heroine had long time ago met a young girl who had a face of an angel in a manor that was in ruins. Later when she returns there she is unable to find her and that is the mystery. She is also torn between 2 men one of whom is the villian. Great read .
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
November 11, 2011
Good Gothic read.
May 20, 2012
I'm very fond of Dorothy Eden and books of this genre, but I really didn't care for this book. I had a hard time getting interested in it, despite being very short. I could have finished it in a couple of hours (it really is short), but I kept putting it down because it just didn't seem that interesting. The plot and characters seemed shallow to me. Oh, well.
July 8, 2017
I polished this off in a couple of hours--it's a short book, less than 200 pages--and was getting ready to toss it into the "genre fluff of yesteryear" category, as on first glance, it seemed rather formulaic and the plot was wildly improbable. But then I started thinking about it, as I was trying to fall asleep, and I began to admire what Eden had done with this little novel. For one thing, it didn't feel like a short book--it had an intricate (if wildly improbable) plot and a total of six main characters, and room enough to fit it all in without feeling rushed. And, in less than 200 pages, she managed to flesh out all six of the characters as fully as most mystery genre authors do, and some of them take two or three times the page count to do it. As I read, I thought the writing seemed a bit stiff and inelegant, but thinking about the book, I realized how well realized many of the scenes were. And a bonus: only one of three female characters was too stupid to live! So why only three stars? Well, it's still some wildly improbably genre fluff, and probably won't appeal to those who don't already love the classic Gothic in all its nostalgic glory.... But if that's what you're in the mood for, Dorothy Eden is usually a good choice.
December 22, 2025
I loved the suspense in this one. Dorothy Eden's other books have more atmosphere and descriptions, but this one focused on the characters a lot more and the drama between them. Even though I prefer her more atmospheric books, I loved this one for its other qualities. The characters are pretty vivid and entertaining. The main character has a pretty good reason for getting into the initial situation at hand, too, in my opinion, which helps it feel more believable. I was entertained and read this rather quickly. It's a quick read for most, I expect. A fun ride.
August 14, 2022
3.5 stars
A contemporary (for the time written) suspense. The cover is more Gothic than the story, but it offered a solid plot with some good twists.
I have five more Dorothy Edens to collect and read to have all her books.
A contemporary (for the time written) suspense. The cover is more Gothic than the story, but it offered a solid plot with some good twists.
I have five more Dorothy Edens to collect and read to have all her books.
Want to read
October 16, 2022Que tal,aún no lo leo ,quisiera poder descargarlo o leerlo ,espero lo puedan habilitar.Gracias
July 16, 2022
C. Fiction; suspense; from stash, discard
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews