Book description
The residents of the Close were much concerned with crime -
preventing it, that is. With all those out-of-work teenagers on the
nearby council estate hanging around, stealing, joy-riding and
goodness knows what else, it was just as well that Paul Mathieson was
setting up a Neighbourhood Watch scheme.
Not that the inhabitants of the Close did not have their own little
activities, of course, but these were hardly the same thing. If Jenny
and Alan's daughter was caught travelling on the underground without a
ticket, and their son was doing a little experimenting with certain
substances, and Laura didn't see the need to declare her earnings from
hiring out her house to a film crew, and Jenny drove home only just
over the legal limit - well, these were quite different matters, not
to be compared with what went on in the Estate. And then there was
Jenny's discovery, when she advertised flute lessons, that she could
work up quite a nice little earner in a rather unexpected way...
As the leafy London street resounded to the efforts of its citizens
to keep crime at bay, Jenny realised that it was her marriage, rather
than her property, that needed watching.
Judy Astley was frequently told off for day-dreaming at her drearily
traditional school but has found it to be the ideal training for
becoming a writer. There were several false-starts to her career:
secretary at an all-male Oxford college (sacked for undisclosable
reasons), at an airline (decided, after a crash and a hijacking, that
she was safer elsewhere) and as a dress designer (quit before anyone
noticed she was adapting Vogue patterns). She spent some years as a
parent and as a painter before sensing that the day was approaching when
she'd have to go out and get a Proper Job. With a nagging certainty that
she was temperamentally unemployable, and desperate to avoid office
coffee, having to wear tights every day and missing out on sunny days on
Cornish beaches with her daughters, she wrote her first novel, Just for
the Summer. She has now had eleven novels published by Black Swan.
