Book description
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. Sheila Radley 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.
