Amazon Review
The greatest crimes are ones where a whole society is the victim; Robert Goddard's excellent historical thriller Sea Change has as its background the South Sea Bubble, the vast concatenation of Stock Market frauds which changed and corrupted eighteenth-century English life. Naive young Spandrel is pulled from debtor's prison to carry abroad a book detailing bribes paid by the South Sea Company to the highest in the land, and finds himself the victim of murderous assault and a frame-up for murder. Trying both to clear his name, and profit from the situation, he finds himself chasing the beautiful untrustworthy Estelle and her confederates from Amsterdam to the Alps and on to Rome, where the Jacobites would just love to buy a lever to oust King George, and then to London, where things become even more complex. Spandrel is all the more attractive a protagonist because he is no more than averagely honest and goes through an interesting metamorphosis from victim to hero; Estelle is a villainess with interesting attacks of conscience. This is an intelligent portrait of an age, imaginatively combining known historical fact with some fascinating invention and some moments of desperate excitement or startling revelation. --Roz Kaveney