A chance encounter with a stranger, Priscilla Blunt, seems to offer Nina Crowther an escape from her problems. Middle-aged, struggling to recover from the shock of her husband divorcing her to marry a younger (and pregnant) woman, Nina happily falls in with Priscilla’s idea to house-sit for her while she and her husband visit South Africa.
When the phone rings on her first night in the Blunts’ Berkshire manor house she expects it to be one of her daughters, but when she lifts the receiver no one speaks. All Nina hears is a shuddering sigh. As the calls persist Nina fears she has attracted an unwelcome suitor – or is it the man who is brutally murdering women in a nearby village? Or could it be one and the same person?
When the phone rings on her first night in the Blunts’ Berkshire manor house she expects it to be one of her daughters, but when she lifts the receiver no one speaks. All Nina hears is a shuddering sigh. As the calls persist Nina fears she has attracted an unwelcome suitor – or is it the man who is brutally murdering women in a nearby village? Or could it be one and the same person?
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Reviews
There is not a word wasted in Margaret Yorke's deftly constructed crime novels, yet they have a hinterland greater than many novels twice the length. Her understanding of the faultlines that run through human beings is second to none
Margaret Yorke knows all about human weaknesses and follies, vanities and ambitions, as well as about that rarer phenomenon, real, unadulterated evil
The mistress of the skilfully-spun suspense novel . . . her quiet, unemphatic style of narrative makes the story a compelling read
Her short, sparse accounts of things going wrong and innocent people getting caught up in events beyond their control never fails to induce a powerful sense of apprehension and foreboding