Book description
Clare protested her innocence, but Venetian-born Guy Lombardi was sure
she must be lying. 'It isn't usual,' he pointed out sardonically, 'for a
tourist to become acquainted with a man with a police record, and yet
another who is a notorious mob leader.' But that was what happened when,
on the final evening of her week's holiday in Venice, Clare Lambert
lingered alone to admire the splendours of St Mark's Square. And when
she and her friends moved on to an hotel on the shores of Lake Garda,
she found that she was being followed - and followed again - by men who
were at best thieves and extortionists and at worst murderers . . .
Hester Rowan 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. Hester Rowan also wrote 10 crime
novels as Sheila Radley.
