Synopsis
There is no shortage of suspects when Jasmine Woods - an attractive, successful romantic novelist - is found by her anguished young secretary, Alison, savagely murdered. Though men were attracted to her and women liked her company, their feelings were often ambivalent, as Alison's father, Chief Inspector Douglas Quantrill, and his clever young assistant, Martin Tait, both observed at a party celebrating Jasmine's latest novel.
Her cousin, a failed playwright, resented her riches; her neighbour, intellectual television pundit Jonathan Elliott, despised her kind of fiction; his feminist wife Roz hated its old-fashioned message. Even Quantrill himself resented the fact that his wife was more roused by Jasmine's fictional heroes than by himself . . .
So when Jasmine's body is discovered, one morning some months later, Quantrill and Tait set to work to interview those hostile friends; to trace valuable oriental ornaments missing from her disordered living-room; and through her former secretary Anne, now engaged to a local farmer, to learn about the men in Jasmine's life. But as he unravels these strands of the mystery, Quantrill is weighed down by the tangle of fear and concern he feels for his wife, and for his daughter.
Against a beautiful and loving portrait of the Suffolk countryside Sheila Radley sets her absorbing story of mystery, love and violence.
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About the Author
Sheila Radley is the pseudonym of Sheila Robinson, who was born and brought up in rural Northamptonshire, one of the fortunate means-tested generation whose further education was free. She went from her village school via high school to London University, where she read history.
She served for nine years as an education officer in the Women’s Royal Air Force, then worked variously as a teacher, a clerk in a shoe factory, a civil servant and in advertising. In the 1960s she opted out of conventional work and joined her partner in running a Norfolk village store and post office, where she began writing fiction in her spare time. Her first books, written as Hester Rowan, were three romantic novels; she then took to crime, and wrote 10 crime novels as Sheila Radley.
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