Book description
A decent and happily married man, Derek Cartwright finds himself
dreaming of murdering his resident mother-in-law. And when by chance he
meets the repellent Hugh Packer, a stranger who is also lumbered with an
elderly dependent, what had merely been a midnight fantasy suddenly
seems a practical possibility. Like latter-day 'strangers on a train',
they could swap murders. That is Packer's idea, anyway: 'You've got a
problem, I've got a problem, and together we've come up with the perfect
solution. The sooner we get the jobs done the better.' Derek Cartwright
knows he can never bring himself to murder anyone - not even an old man
incapacitated by a stroke. But each time he thinks of his mother- in-law
and how her presence in their home distresses his wife, he finds
Packer's proposition more difficult to resist. After all, he only has to
leave the old lady alone one evening - perhaps by taking his wife out to
dinner. But then, there is the family beagle to be got out of the way .
. . And that proves only the first of Derek's unnervingly difficult
tasks, as he tries to set up a scenario that will deceive Detective
Chief Inspector Quantrill of Breckham Market CID. Sheila Radley's dark
and gripping story traces the descent of an upright husband and citizen
into blunder, terror, nightmare, and murder. 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.
