The Murderer's Daughter - Jonathan Kellerman

From the creator of the acclaimed Alex Delaware series comes a tour de force standalone novel that illustrates perfectly why “Jonathan Kellerman has justly earned his reputation as a master of the psychological thriller” (People).

A brilliant, deeply dedicated psychologist, Grace Blades has a gift for treating troubled souls and tormented psyches—perhaps because she bears her own invisible scars: Only five years old when she witnessed her parents’ deaths in a bloody murder-suicide, Grace took refuge in her fierce intellect and found comfort in the loving couple who adopted her. But even as an adult with an accomplished professional life, Grace still has a dark, secret side. When her two worlds shockingly converge, Grace’s harrowing past returns with a vengeance.

Both Grace and her newest patient are stunned when they recognize each other from a recent encounter. Haunted by his bleak past, mild-mannered Andrew Toner is desperate for Grace’s renowned therapeutic expertise and more than willing to ignore their connection. And while Grace is tempted to explore his case, which seems to eerily echo her grim early years, she refuses—a decision she regrets when a homicide detective appears on her doorstep.

An evil she thought she’d outrun has reared its head again, but Grace fears that a police inquiry will expose her double life. Launching her own personal investigation leads her to a murderously manipulative foe, one whose warped craving for power forces Grace back into the chaos and madness she’d long ago fled.

Orphan 8 - Kim van Alkemade

In this stunning new historical novel inspired by true events, Kim van Alkemade tells the fascinating story of a woman who must choose between revenge and mercy when she encounters the doctor who subjected her to dangerous medical experiments in a New York City Jewish orphanage years before.

In 1919, Rachel Rabinowitz is a vivacious four-year-old living with her family in a crowded tenement on New York City’s Lower Eastside. When tragedy strikes, Rachel is separated from her brother Sam and sent to a Jewish orphanage where Dr. Mildred Solomon is conducting medical research. Subjected to X-ray treatments that leave her disfigured, Rachel suffers years of cruel harassment from the other orphans. But when she turns fifteen, she runs away to Colorado hoping to find the brother she lost and discovers a family she never knew she had.

Though Rachel believes she’s shut out her painful childhood memories, years later she is confronted with her dark past when she becomes a nurse at Manhattan’s Old Hebrews Home and her patient is none other than the elderly, cancer-stricken Dr. Solomon. Rachel becomes obsessed with making Dr. Solomon acknowledge, and pay for, her wrongdoing. But each passing hour Rachel spends with the old doctor reveal to Rachel the complexities of her own nature. She realizes that a person’s fate—to be one who inflicts harm or one who heals—is not always set in stone.

Lush in historical detail, rich in atmosphere and based on true events, Orphan #8 is a powerful, affecting novel of the unexpected choices we are compelled to make that can shape our destinies.

Make Me - Lee Child

Jack Reacher has no place to go, and all the time in the world to get there, so a remote railroad stop on the prairie with the curious name of Mother's Rest seems perfect for an aimless one-day stopover.

He expects to find a lonely pioneer tombstone in a sea of nearly-ripe wheat ... but instead there is a woman waiting for a missing colleague, a cryptic note about two hundred deaths, and a small town full of silent, watchful people.

Reacher’s one-day stopover becomes an open-ended quest...into the heart of darkness. Prepare to be nailed to your seat by another hair-raising, heart-pounding adventure from the kick ass master of the thriller genre!

Recipes for Love and Murder - Sally Andrew

A bright new talent makes her fiction debut with this first entry in a delicious crime set in rural South Africa—a flavorful blend of The #1 Ladies Detective Agency and Goldie Schulz series, full of humor, romance, and recipes and featuring a charming cast of characters.


Tannie Maria (Tannie meaning Auntie, the respectful Afrikaans address for a woman older than you) is a middle-aged widow who likes to cook—and eat. She shares her culinary love as a recipe columnist for the local paper—until The Gazette decides its readers are hungrier for advice on matters of the heart rather than ideas for lunch and dinner.


Tannie Maria doesn’t like the change, but soon discovers she has a knack—and a passion—for helping people. Of course she shares her recipes and culinary advice whenever she can! Assisting other people with their problems, Tannie Maria is eventually forced to face her own issues, especially when the troubles of those she helps touch on the pain of her past, like a woman desperate to escape her abusive husband.


When the woman is murdered, Tannie Maria becomes dangerously entwined in the investigation, despite the best efforts of one striking detective determined to keep her safe. Suddenly, this practical, down-to-earth woman is involved in something much more sinister than perfecting her chocolate cake recipe . .

The Heart of Betrayal - Douglas Kennedy

In the heady strangeness of Morocco, he is everything she wants him to be – passionate, talented, knowledgeable. She is convinced that it is here she will finally become pregnant.

But when Paul suddenly disappears, and Robin finds herself the prime suspect in the police inquiry, everything changes.

As her understanding of the truth starts to unravel, Robin lurches from the crumbling art deco of Casablanca to the daunting Sahara, caught in an increasingly terrifying spiral from which there is no easy escape.

With his acclaimed ability to write page-turners that also make you think, Douglas Kennedy takes the reader on a roller-coaster journey into a heart of darkness that asks the question: what would you do if your life depended on it?

‘Kennedy is a complete genius when it comes to understanding the minds of stylish but troubled women’Daily Mirror

‘Kennedy is an absolute master at love stories with heart-stopping twists’ The Times

‘Kennedy's skill is to send you racing down the slope of sheer story.’ Esquire

The Longest Date - Cindy Chupack

After having endured enough emotional wreckage in her search for true love to fill a book (the New York Times bestseller The Between Boyfriends Book), two magazine columns, and five seasons of scripts forSex and the City, Cindy Chupack finally, mercifully, at the age of thirty-nine, met the Perfect Man.

He did not seem to Cindy like the Perfect Man. Ian, with his bad-boy ways, struck her as someone whom she absolutely did not want as a husband, but he soon proved his worth with wit, warmth, a series of spectacularly cooked meals, and a marriage proposal made on a beautiful beach, the prospective groom perched heroically on a white stallion.

Unable to resist the romance, Cindy married him and settled in contentedly for the long and gratifying happily ever after...or so she thought. Being a wife, Cindy discovers soon enough, is not so different from being a girlfriend, only now you have a permanent houseguest. Ian’s endearing quirks became impossible-to-ignore and slightly irksome habits; what was once charming adventurousness now seems like recklessness (just why was he rappelling down the side of a building on a garden hose?); and his impossibly big heart has space enough for an impossibly big dog, a St. Bernard that looks, as Cindy realizes once it has taken possession of her home, “like a person in a dog suit.” And then there’s all his stuff.

The Longest Date is the wonderfully funny, and ultimately, deeply moving story of a marriage, of the daily negotiations and accommodations about matters like cooking, holidays, space, money, and sex that every (newly or otherwise) wedded couple faces in the course of figuring out exactly who they are together and where they are headed. Cindy and Ian’s own ongoing courtship takes a surprising turn when they decide to have a baby―a plan that turns out to be far more complicated than they ever could have anticipated and that tests and strengthens their love for each other.

The perfect companion for anyone navigating a marriage (or even just contemplating one), The Longest Date marks the welcome return of one of our most gifted and captivating comic writers.

Notes from a Big Country - Bill Bryson

Bill Bryson has the rare knack of being out of his depth wherever he goes - even (perhaps especially) in the land of his birth. This became all too apparent when, after nearly two decades in England, the world's best-loved travel writer upped sticks with Mrs Bryson, little Jimmy et al. and returned to live in the country he had left as a youth.

Of course there were things Bryson missed about Blighty but any sense of loss was countered by the joy of rediscovering some of the forgotten treasures of his childhood: the glories of a New England autumn; the pleasingly comical sight of oneself in shorts; and motel rooms where you can generally count on being awakened in the night by a piercing shriek and the sound of a female voice pleading, 'Put the gun down, Vinnie, I'll do anything you say.'

Whether discussing the strange appeal of breakfast pizza or the jaw-slackening direness of American TV, Bill Bryson brings his inimitable brand of bemused wit to bear on that strangest of phenomena - the American way of life.

The Monogram Murders - Sophie Hannah

The new Hercule Poirot novel – another brilliant murder mystery that can only be solved by the eponymous Belgian detective and his ‘little grey cells’.

Since the publication of her first book in 1920, Agatha Christie wrote 33 novels, two plays and more than 50 short stories featuring Hercule Poirot. Now, for the first time ever, the guardians of her legacy have approved a brand new novel featuring Dame Agatha's most beloved creation.

Hercule Poirot's quiet supper in a London coffee house is interrupted when a young woman confides to him that she is about to be murdered. She is terrified, but begs Poirot not to find and punish her killer. Once she is dead, she insists, justice will have been done.

Later that night, Poirot learns that three guests at the fashionable Bloxham Hotel have been murdered, a cufflink placed in each one’s mouth. Could there be a connection with the frightened woman? While Poirot struggles to put together the bizarre pieces of the puzzle, the murderer prepares another hotel bedroom for a fourth victim…

In the hands of internationally bestselling author Sophie Hannah, Poirot plunges into a mystery set in 1920s London – a diabolically clever puzzle that can only be solved by the talented Belgian detective and his ‘little grey cells’.

The Girl Next Door - Ruth Rendell

The dazzling new novel from Ruth Rendell. When the bones of two severed hands are discovered in a box, an investigation into a long buried crime of passion begins. And a group of friends, who played together as children, begin to question their past.

‘For Woody, anger was cold. Cold and slow. But once it had started it mounted gradually and he could think of nothing else. He knew he couldn’t stay alive while those two were alive. Instead of sleeping, he lay awake in the dark and saw those hands. Anita’s narrow white hand with the long nails painted pastel pink, the man’s brown hand equally shapely, the fingers slightly splayed.'

Before the advent of the Second World War, beneath the green meadows of Loughton, Essex, a dark network of tunnels has been dug. A group of children discover them. They play there. It becomes their secret place.

Seventy years on, the world has changed. Developers have altered the rural landscape. Friends from a half-remembered world have married, died, grown sick, moved on or disappeared.

Work on a new house called Warlock uncovers a grisly secret, buried a lifetime ago, and a weary detective, more preoccupied with current crimes, must investigate a possible case of murder.

In all her novels, Ruth Rendell digs deep beneath the surface to investigate the secrets of the human psyche. The interconnecting tunnels of Loughton in THE GIRL NEXT DOOR lead to no single destination. But the relationships formed there, and the incidents that occurred, exert a profound influence – not only on the survivors but in unearthing the true nature of the mysterious past.

Arctic Summer - Damon Galgut

Damon Galgut's third novel, a fictionalized biography of English author E.M. Forster, focuses on Forster's many years in India and the process of writing his masterpiece, A Passage to India. This compact, finely wrought novel also addresses Forster's unforgiving childhood in England and the homosexuality he feared and repressed throughout his life. Psychologically acute without being sentimental, Forster's relationships are described with compassion and great care. Galgut is a master at constructing strange, compelling landscapes, and Arctic Summer shifts seamlessly between staid, restricting England and Cairo and vibrant, pleasantly, absurd India. Moments of gentle humor shine through the sparse prose, lending Forster a humanity that makes his story all the more heartbreaking.

The Festival of Insignificance - Milan Kundera

Set in modern-day Paris, The Festival of Insignificance follows four friends who run into each other in the Luxembourg Gardens, attend parties, and conduct a long-running exchange on sex, desire, history, art, and even the meaning of human existence. Kundera pokes fun at our sense of self-importance, and one of the friends, Ramon, proposes that we rejoice in the freedom of recognizing our own insignificance. What a liberating thought! The Festival of Insignificance takes up all the themes that have informed this great writer's fiction, embracing the comic and laughing at a culture that has lost what is most vital to life: that necessary and seemingly elusive sense of humor.

Green Lion - Henrietta Rose-Innes

This review is from
http://bookslive.co.za/blog/2015/05/11/an-unnatural-history-hedley-twidle-reviews-henrietta-rose-inness-green-lion/

Now that Cecil Rhodes has been toppled from his plinth and trucked away for safekeeping, the question is what exactly to do with the man. One idea has been to relocate the statue to the Old Zoo just beyond the edge of the University of Cape Town’s campus. It is a lush, unsettling place of stone ruins and overgrown cages, where rough sleepers sleep rough in graffiti-covered enclosures and students sneak off for a joint between lectures. Instead of gazing out toward hinterlands, here the imperialist could himself be gazed at – not unlike the various animals that he once installed in this 19th-century menagerie.

The Old Zoo is at the heart of Henrietta Rose-Innes’s remarkable new novel: an eccentric, dream-like meditation on the lives and deaths of animals. Though in her vision of the near future, The Lion House has become a modernised research institute and tourist attraction. It is dedicated to breeding extinct animals back into the world (“Like they did with quaggas”) with two black-maned descendants of the vanished Cape lion as the star attraction. This until one of the employees gets (like the unfortunate Timothy Treadwell of Grizzly Man) too close to the animals, and is badly mauled.

For most of the novel Mark lies in hospital, suspended Lazarus-like in bandages, while an old friend Constantine (Con) takes his place as a volunteer, comforts his elderly mother, figures out his life. And so the novel engages that fertile but often ignored literary subject – a difficult friendship – and the way in which the fierce intimacies of youth dwindle to mere adult acquaintance. We gradually learn of Con and Mark’s childhood together and the tragedy that haunts it; but there is little by way of plot to intrude on the novel’s main achievement: the evocation of a world in which most wild animals have disappeared – and what the psychic consequences of this might be.

In this future that may well be the present, Table Mountain has become a fenced preserve for the few species that remain: a 21st-century Ark that is guarded and (in theory) only accessible through expensive guided tours. But as Con’s relationship with an ambitious actress falters, he is repeatedly drawn away from her slick Sea Point flat and across boundaries of all kinds: of class, age and species. Each chapter is named for an animal: rooikat, stegosaurus, lobster, parrot, eland… Sometimes the reason is clear; elsewhere we are left wondering how the animal trace might be silently shaping the prose we read. At the elusive centre of the work is the remaining lioness Sekhmet, who reclines in the shadows of the enclosure: out of vision but audible, smellable.

Not a pet owner myself, not unduly concerned with cat videos or charismatic megafauna, not quite sure about the Kruger Park – I could hardly be classed as “an animal person”. Certainly not the kind of animal person who populates one wry scene in the novel, where a cultish group gather in a suburb that I took to be Plumstead, reverently watching nature documentaries and fondling pythons with quasi-religious intensity. “There’s …energy we get from wild animals”, says one of the group, “And because there are so few wild creatures left now, we have to find ways of getting that contact”.

But the power of Green Lion is to remind us that we are all, in fact, animal people. That the physical and psychological residue of the creatures we evolved with and from is still within us: in our figures of speech, on our currency, in our dreams, in our breathing, our scent. It is intriguing how the novel exchanges sight, that most imperious of senses, for smell. The erotic charge of human musk; the “humble animal funk” of dirty socks; the chemical smell that haunts Mark’s family home, full of taxidermied creatures – this sensory register works to estrange and deepen a story that might otherwise be written off as just another suburban family history with a secret lurking in its past.

The novel’s idiosyncrasy is welcome in a place where the stories we agree to tell ourselves about “nature” are often so predictable. For many, the very phrase “nature writing” is a drab one. It conjures ideas of purple prose, piousness or sentimentality: a kind of writing that is often anodyne and politically toothless. Or else conservative and misanthropic in its commitment to deep ecology and wilderness as the antidote to everything human. The critiques of this idea of nature are also familiar by now: that the conservation of animals has often been at the expense of human beings (Rhodes was, after all, an early conservationist); that loving the natural world means not loving the human one.

One of Rose-Innes’s most vital achievements as a novelist is to have escaped these bifurcated logics and found other – beguilingly other – ways of writing the complex ecologies of which we form part. From the aquarium scenes in her debut Shark’s Egg to the mountain boulder that comes crashing toward a glass-walled mansion in Homing; from the non-specific environmental crisis in her prize-winning story “Poison” to the mysterious insect infestation that menaces a luxury seafront development in Nineveh – she has repeatedly been drawn to the porous edgelands of our built world. Her prose is minutely alert to what George Steiner called “teeming strangeness and menace” of the organic presence all around us, and the pressure that it exerts at the borders of our understanding.

There is a laden, even scriptural character to the writing that can be challenging at points, but it slowly opens out into set-pieces of real power. If contour maps are one technique of reducing a mountain to two dimensions, another is descriptive prose. The later chapters – which follow Con disorientatedly roaming a mountain chain that is both familiar and deeply strange – must be one of the most powerful renderings of its reservoirs, mist, foliage and stone ever committed to paper. The novel dislocates Table Mountain National Park from its conventional framings of tourism and leisure in order to log its uncanny, indifferent presence – its unnatural history.

Pulsing behind it all is a something deeply sorrowful: a work of mourning for both the human losses within the book but also the life forms that are vanishing from the earth beyond. The story of organic evolution, ecologists remind us, is underwritten by loss on a quite unimaginable scale: the fossil record shows that 99 per cent of all life that has ever existed on earth has gone extinct. Now we find ourselves in the midst of the sixth major extinction event, but the first caused by an animal, Homo sapiens, that has assumed geomorphic powers. Turning away from the “human interest” stories that dominate our news feeds and 24-hour media cycles, Green Lion reads as a local requiem for this global story: for the vast planetary die-off that is mostly happening outside language, that is both immeasurably sad and inescapably “natural”. Rose-Innes’s work seeks out ways of honouring our animal ghosts and keeping them, in some small and symbolic measure, alive.

Murderers, Miscreants and Mutineering - Nigel Penn

In this new volume Penn, a consummate raconteur and storyteller, brings to life an assortment of extraordinary personalities from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. There is Maria Mouton, the first white woman at the Cape to be executed, for her adulterous affair with a slave and the murder of her husband. Then, too, there is Johannes Seidenfaden, an LMS missionary whose ‘enormities’ so shocked Dr John Philip, the LMS superintendent, that he branded him ‘a wolf in sheep’s clothing’. (Seidenfaden, a married man, had not only attempted to seduce his Khoikhoi housekeeper on five occasions but also turned his mission station of Suurbraak, just outside Swellendam, into his own personal fiefdom and impoverished all the Khoikhoi inhabitants.)

Other chapters tell stories of desertion by ill-treated soldiers in Cape Town, who intended to escape to Mozambique but got no further than the Hottentots Holland Mountains, where they were apprehended before being hanged; the escapades of the Swiss Meuron Regiment at the Cape; and the ‘ear atrocity’ in the Onder Bokkeveld near Ceres.

These remarkable stories, told with élan, erudition and humour, throw light on our extraordinary past and reveal much about social relations and human experience in the early Cape colony.

I am Malala - Malala Yousafzai

"I come from a country that was created at midnight. When I almost died it was just after midday."

When the Taliban took control of the Swat Valley in Pakistan, one girl spoke out. Malala Yousafzai refused to be silenced and fought for her right to an education.

On Tuesday, October 9, 2012, when she was fifteen, she almost paid the ultimate price. She was shot in the head at point-blank range while riding the bus home from school, and few expected her to survive.

Instead, Malala's miraculous recovery has taken her on an extraordinary journey from a remote valley in northern Pakistan to the halls of the United Nations in New York. At sixteen, she became a global symbol of peaceful protest and the youngest nominee ever for the Nobel Peace Prize.

I AM MALALA is the remarkable tale of a family uprooted by global terrorism, of the fight for girls' education, of a father who, himself a school owner, championed and encouraged his daughter to write and attend school, and of brave parents who have a fierce love for their daughter in a society that prizes sons.

I AM MALALA will make you believe in the power of one person's voice to inspire change in the world.

The Truth According to Us - Annie Barrows

Annie Barrows once again evokes the charm and eccentricity of a small town filled with extraordinary characters. Her new novel, The Truth According to Us, brings to life an inquisitive young girl, her beloved aunt, and the alluring visitor who changes the course of their destiny forever.

In the summer of 1938, Layla Beck’s father, a United States senator, cuts off her allowance and demands that she find employment on the Federal Writers’ Project, a New Deal jobs program. Within days, Layla finds herself far from her accustomed social whirl, assigned to cover the history of the remote mill town of Macedonia, West Virginia, and destined, in her opinion, to go completely mad with boredom. But once she secures a room in the home of the unconventional Romeyn family, she is drawn into their complex world and soon discovers that the truth of the town is entangled in the thorny past of the Romeyn dynasty.

At the Romeyn house, twelve-year-old Willa is desperate to learn everything in her quest to acquire her favorite virtues of ferocity and devotion—a search that leads her into a thicket of mysteries, including the questionable business that occupies her charismatic father and the reason her adored aunt Jottie remains unmarried. Layla’s arrival strikes a match to the family veneer, bringing to light buried secrets that will tell a new tale about the Romeyns. As Willa peels back the layers of her family’s past, and Layla delves deeper into town legend, everyone involved is transformed—and their personal histories completely rewritten.

Sister Noon - Karen Joy Fowler

Lizzie Hayes, a member of the San Francisco elite, is a seemingly docile, middle-aged spinster praised for her volunteer work with the Ladies Relief and Protection Society Home, or "The Brown Ark". All she needs is the spark that will liberate her from the ruling conventions. When the wealthy and well-connected, but ill-reputed Mary Ellen Pleasant shows up at the Brown Ark, Lizzie is drawn to her. It is the beautiful, but mysterious Mary Ellen, an outcast among the women of the elite because of her notorious past and her involvement in voodoo, who will eventually hold the key to unlocking Lizzie's rebellious nature.

Loosely based in historical fact, Sister Noon is a wryly funny, playfully mysterious, and totally subversive novel from this "fine writer" whose "language dazzles" (San Francisco Chronicle).

Saving Safa - Waris Dirie

Waris Dirie, the Somalia nomad who became a supermodel, and an anti-FGM activist, first came to the world's attention with the publication of her autobiography, Desert Flower. The book was subsequently made into a film and little Safa Nour, from one of the slums of Djibouti in the Horn of Africa, was chosen to play the young Waris.

The book and the film record many extraordinary things - from facing down a tiger, to being discovered by a famous photographer in London - but it also tells the grim story of female circumcision, an ordeal that the young Waris had to endure.

Saving Safa opens with a letter from Safa, now aged seven, who explains that she is worried that she will undergo FGM in spite of the contract her parents have signed with Dirie's Desert Flower Foundation stating that they will never have their daughter cut. Waris drops everything and flies to Djibouti where she meets Safa's father and mother who thinks her daughter should be cut to stop the community ostracising them.

As Safa was saved from FGM through a contract with her parents, the Foundation believes a thousand other girls can be saved through providing their families with aid in return for a promise not to mutilate their daughters

Kim Jong-Il Production - Paul Fischer

"The 1978 abductions of the South Korean actress Choi-Eun-hee and her ex-husband, the director Shin Sang-ok, in Hong Kong is the true crime at the center of Paul Fischer's gripping and surprisingly timely new book."
-The New York Times

Before becoming the world's most notorious dictator, Kim Jong-Il ran North Korea's Ministry for Propaganda and its film studios. Conceiving every movie made, he acted as producer and screenwriter. Despite this control, he was underwhelmed by the available talent and took drastic steps, ordering the kidnapping of Choi Eun-Hee (Madam Choi)-South Korea's most famous actress-and her ex-husband Shin Sang-Ok, the country's most famous filmmaker.

Madam Choi vanished first. When Shin went to Hong Kong to investigate, he was attacked and woke up wrapped in plastic sheeting aboard a ship bound for North Korea. Madam Choi lived in isolated luxury, allowed only to attend the Dear Leader's dinner parties. Shin, meanwhile, tried to escape, was sent to prison camp, and "re-educated." After four years he cracked, pledging loyalty. Reunited with Choi at the first party he attends, it is announced that the couple will remarry and act as the Dear Leader's film advisors. Together they made seven films, in the process gaining Kim Jong-Il's trust. While pretending to research a film in Vienna, they flee to the U.S. embassy and are swept to safety.

A nonfiction thriller packed with tension, passion, and politics, author Paul Fischer's A Kim Jong-Il Production offers a rare glimpse into a secretive world, illuminating a fascinating chapter of North Korea's history that helps explain how it became the hermetically sealed, intensely stage-managed country it remains today.

Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro

In one of the most memorable novels of recent years, Kazuo Ishiguro imagines the lives of a group of students growing up in a darkly skewered version of contemporary England. Narrated by Kathy, now 31,Never Let Me Go hauntingly dramatises her attempts to come to terms with her childhood at the seemingly idyllic Hailsham School, and with the fate that has always awaited her and her closest friends in the wider world. A story of love, friendship and memory, Never Let Me Go is charged throughout with a sense of the fragility of life.

If you enjoyed Never Let Me Go, you might also like Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day, now available in Faber Modern Classics.

An Unsuitable Job for a Woman - PD James

An Unsuitable Job for a Woman introduces bestselling mystery author P.D. James’s courageous but vulnerable young detective, Cordelia Gray, in a “top-rated puzzle of peril that holds you all the way” (The New York Times).

Handsome Cambridge dropout Mark Callender died hanging by the neck with a faint trace of lipstick on his mouth. When the official verdict is suicide, his wealthy father hires fledgling private investigator Cordelia Gray to find out what led him to self-destruction. What she discovers instead is a twisting trail of secrets and sins, and the strong scent of murder.