Ligny's Lake Author:S.H. Courtier "The quest for Lewis Ligny began the night I saw him in Melbourne, five hundred miles from the place where the same day he was alleged to have drowned." — So begins the story of a man whose disappearance is no less mysterious than his past. When Lewis Ligny, a high official in the Australian government, is reported missing, presumably drowned, t... more »here are two very different and equally desperated attempts to find him. Australian Security claims they have finally uncovered the fact that during World War II, Ligny, a captain in the sappers, had deliberately killed three men under his command. Sandy Carmichael, his best friend and the story's narrator, refuses to believe that this gentle man could be capable of such an atrocity.
Though warned off by Security, he begins his own search for Ligny. His only clue: a seventy-year-old copy of Walden in Ligny's library, a copy gives as a gift to Miss Rhoda Hancock for a prize essay in 1900. His second clue: Miss Hancock herself, now an eighty-one-year-old woman, who was very much involved with Captain Ligny during the War. It is she who shows him incontrovertible proof that Ligny was capable of extreme cruelties and was every bit the sadist Security claims he was. Carmichael's faith is dented but not shattered, though it seems now to be a fruitless search for a man he doesn't really know.
The double-pronged chase leads through the Australian outback to the edge of the wild Tasman Sea where, in a gripping finale, the enigma of this lonely man and a twenty-eight-year-old atrocity are revealed.« less