Search Results for: turning-on

She always felt different – and now she knows why.

‘An outstanding novel which confirms Glaister’s command of the domestic and the bizarre’ Independent on Sunday

‘Enormously enjoyable’ Nick Hornby

Jennifer is about to turn thirteen and is suffering more than the usual teenage confusion. She’s lonely and her parents are unfashionably strange, so she lives in her imagination, dreaming of acceptance, to be popular and normal.

Then Jennifer learns that her supposed parents are really her grandparents, and that her mother deserted her years ago. So when Bronwyn, the new girl at school, and the sinister Johnny crash into her life, adventures with them – no matter how dangerous – seem immediately more attractive.

‘Glaister’s rounded gift is to show life as it really is’ Independent on Sunday

The perfect Halloween novel!

‘Glaister has the uncomfortable knack of putting her finger on things we most fear, of exposing the darkness within’ Independent on Sunday

‘Before Gillian Flynn, there was Lesley Glaister’ Harper’s Bazaar

All Nell’s life, Olive Owen has lived next door but one. And all her life, Nell has hated her. Even at school Olive had sparkled indecently, turning heads. Nell has a son, her pleasure and her shame, though now she lives alone. Nell is sharp in all the places Olive is round.

When Wolfe moves into the house in between them, their quiet street is transformed. A lonely, spirited eight-year-old boy, he knocks on their doors at Halloween and invites them to his bonfire party. As the fireworks flare, he finds himself in the middle of an ancient conflict, grudges bared and burning with a fury he could never have imagined.

‘A perfect, black little tale’ Observer

A woman dies by violence aboard the Santa Cristina. A radio flash from the West Indies brings word of an apparently related death. A man’s body turns up, and in his hand is a suicide note written in one woman’s handwriting but signed with another woman’s name.

But what part does the jar of blood play – and why is everyone so interested in the contents of a certain package wrapped in cherub-bedecked paper? That’s the puzzle Captain Urizar has to solve in a case with a startling showdown.

Other than her Uncle George, Sukie was the only member of the notorious Heap family who was still at large. Her great-grandfather, who had invented a particularly nasty machine gun, was immortalised in wax at Madame Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors. So was Sukie’s grandmother, who one day had taken an axe and disposed of five of her neighbours. Sukie’s mother later tried her hand at arson and was sent to a mental institution.

Sukie defiantly explained, as had her mother before her, that insanity did not run in the family. The Heaps were definitely being maligned. But, naturally, when Mr Bentley turned up dead with a bloody axe at his side, Sukie’s husband figured she was at last taking up the family trade

‘A charnel-house frolic’ The Spectator

Clifford Flush founded the Asterisk Club in Chelsea to provide a home for wrongfully acquitted murderers, being one himself. Qualified prospective members need only name the club as beneficiary in their wills in order to avail themselves of its comforts and unique services.

Unfortunately, there isn’t room for Benjamin Cann, a gentleman’s outfitter newly acquitted of murdering his mistress. So Flush arranges for Benjamin to be temporarily quartered next door in a rat-infested house inhabited by two artistic couples. When Benjamin and a female member of the Asterisk Club turn up dead, the two households both have reason to avoid the police and dispose of the bodies …

‘Ingenious and successful farce’ Sunday Times

Perhaps it really started when scriptwriter Richard Blake, finishing last-minute revisions in the early hours of the morning, found the naked blonde on his driveway. Nobody ever saw her again, but she turned out to be a vital clue.

The movie’s fading star is Caresse Garnet, a woman so universally disliked that you could throw a stone in Hollywood and find somebody who hates her: the producer who knows she’s box office poison but can’t fire her; the ingénue whose scenes are being cut to ribbons on her instructions; the director with a wife and a love-nest …

All these ingredients add up to a story of a murder that couldn’t happen – but does.

With six days remaining until he goes to the electric chair for the murder of his wife, wealthy broker Robert Westland needs help, fast. He insists that he has been framed, and Bill Crane, a private detective with a method and manner all his own, must prove his client’s innocence.

In a mixture of the humorous and the macabre, Crane’s investigation, set against an evocative Depression-era backdrop, turns up more than a few queer characters – including a tight-lipped valet and a dypsomanic widow – who may or may not know something about who really murdered Mrs Westland.

Margaret Fielding was tried for the murder of her first husband ten years ago and, innocent, was acquitted for lack of evidence. Now someone is threatening to produce evidence that could convict her.

Classic crime from one of the greats of the Detection Club

Fortunately, Margaret meets Arthur Crook, the detective lawyer to whom the innocent turn, never in vain. When her blackmailer is found murdered, just after she is seen, distraught, leaving the premises, it is to Crook that she tells her tale. But someone knows Crook by reputation, and is anxious that he does not take on Margaret’s case.

An ordinary day – which turns to blackmail and murder.
Classic crime from one of the greats of the Detection Club

What seemed like an ordinary phone call in the middle of the afternoon suddenly plunges its recipient, Simon Crete, into a plot of blackmail and murder.

‘Tell him it’s no use. I haven’t got it,’ the mystery woman’s voice cried desperately down the line. But who was she? And why was she ringing a man whom she had never seen?

An ordinary couple – but wherever they go, death follows…
Classic crime from one of the greats of the Detection Club

Mr Cobb is the third elderly invalid to die conveniently, if unexpectedly, in the house of Fred and Bessie Meadows. Yet who could suspect this responsible, honest couple? Nothing is too much trouble, yet wherever they go, death goes too. But their third crime involves them with Arthur Crook, and that’s when their luck turns.

Fans of the lawyer-sleuth know that his arrival on the scene brings action, and that every sort of cunning will be employed to ensure the innocent are kept safe and the guilty … trapped.

‘No author is more skilled at making a good story seem brilliant’ Sunday Express

Forget The Girl on the Train – meet the woman who watches from her window, and finds herself caught up in murder…
Classic crime from one of the greats of the Detection Club


‘Watching, fascinated and horrified, he saw thin fingers creep around the edge of the black curtain. Someone from inside was tugging to loosen it . . .’

Miss Janet Martin, a 74-year-old spinster, enjoys her daily habit of watching passers-by from her window. When she strikes up a friendship with one of them – the golden-haired Pamela – she has no inkling that the innocence of her fading years is about to be turned upside down.

The little old lady becomes inextricably involved in the child’s fate, and when she calls in private eye Arthur Crook to help, a plot of abduction, fraud and murder unfolds . . .

In the ‘ads – wanted’ section, no one said anything about murder…
Classic crime from one of the greats of the Detection Club

‘No author is more skilled at making a good story seem brilliant’ Sunday Express

Middle-aged spinsters of independent means shouldn’t answer matrimonial adverts. Agatha Forbes realised this when she saw what her brand new husband kept in his woodshed and screamed in mortal terror.

By then her husband’s tender caresses had slowly turned into a stranglehold. But, unbeknown to her, the moment that a doctor would scrawl his signature on her death certificate was creeping nearer with each passing day.

Lawyer-detective Arthur Crook always believes his clients are innocent… despite the evidence to the contrary.
Classic crime from one of the greats of the Detection Club

A famous art collector’s car discovered at the bottom of a cliff after he was supposed to have taken a young woman to the railway station, so naturally the police expect to find his body there, too. But it turns up weeks later, in a locked room in his country house, and he’s been stabbed to death…

District Attorney Frank Duryea had more than a simple murder case on his hands. Had someone killed both Addison Stearne and C. Arthur Right and then vanished? Or had it been a murder and a suicide? And, in either case, who died first? A vast fortune depended on the answer.

The obvious suspect was Nita Moline, who claimed she discovered the bodies, rushed up on deck and fainted. However, nobody had seen her come aboard. And through the tangled web of evidence, there seemed to be more than one mystery. Fortunately for Frank Duryea, his wife’s grandfather – the black sheep of a wild family – came for a visit and got in everybody’s way.

Blond Eve Dawson came to Hollywood to be a star and didn’t make the grade. But as a party girl she was much in demand – until someone shot her during a wild party given for a lot of prominent politicians.

Everyone clammed up and pressure was brought to bear – even on popular D.A. Doug Selby. But Selby and Sheriff Brandon wouldn’t hush.

The next time beautiful Eve turned up she was a corpse with a carving knife deep in her chest. And even that suave old fox A.B. Carr couldn’t stop the D.A. from finding out who killed her and why.

All that glitters isn’t gold.

A rich man sends Donald Lam looking for a man – when he really wants to find a woman. A minor missing persons case turns out to be a major one. And a pleasure boat on pontoons serves as a smuggler’s ship on wheels.

This is a job for detectives who know their fact from fiction, and Bertha Cool and Donald Lam are pitted against people who know too well that all grass isn’t green.

Mira Woodford was a beautiful girl who believed that the best things in life were expensive. She bartered her youthful charms for the rewards of being an old man’s bride, and her investment paid off in millions when she suddenly became his widow.

When Bertha Cool sent Donald Lam to find out if Mira’s kisses had turned to poison for the rich little poor girl’s late husband, one look at Mira made Donald eager to see for himself how deadly her embrace really was. But though Mira was lovely and willing, her past was ugly and threatening – and when passion and blackmail went hand in hand, murder could not be far behind.

Strange bedfellows can be political poison, and the candidate had picked himself a dilly. She was ruthless and corrupt and had enough on him to smear his shining armour with front page mud.

Donald Lam and Bertha Cool told him not to worry. Women were Donald’s speciality, the more dangerous the better. But when the lovely lady turned up dead, the case took an ugly twist. Suddenly Lam and Cool were in the middle of a red-hot race where bullets, not ballots, counted.

When Norda Allison saw her husband-to-be slap his young son, she immediately called off the wedding. Now she is terrified. Her ex-fiancé has beaten up her new boyfriend, and anonymous newspaper clippings are flooding her mailbox – articles graphically depicting what jilted men do to the women who leave them.

Then Norda’s life takes an even darker turn. It begins with a barking dog, a child’s scream, a gun shot, and the discovery of a dead body – and takes a further twist when Norda is arrested and charged with brutal murder. Now only the brilliant courtroom strategist Perry Mason stands between Norda and a sentence of certain death …

Frances Celane has good reason to pout. Thanks to a provision in her late father’s will administered by her uncle, she’s caught in the middle of a family feud between matrimony and money. If she chooses marriage, she loses a million. But beautiful young Frances has a strong will of her own she’s not afraid to use. One way or another, she means to hear wedding bells and cash registers making beautiful music together. Her first move: hire Perry Mason to orchestrate things.

Unfortunately, stubbornness runs in Frances Celane’s family, as Mason discovers when he confronts her Uncle Edward. After Perry’s powers of persuasion fail to penetrate Norton’s hard head, someone decides the only way of cashing in is by bashing in the uncooperative uncle’s skull. But when the blood spills, so do the secrets. Then it’s Mason’s turn to brood, as he tries to figure out if a girl as pretty as his client could have a hand in something so ugly …

When she was thirteen years old, Abigail Allen was responsible for killing her parents and boyfriend. Guilt has become Abigail’s constant companion. She has reconciled herself to living alone – until she meets Silas Graves, a photographer who knows about her past but loves her in spite of it.

A possessive, jealous man, Silas can forgive almost anything – except betrayal. But the people he has loved most have all betrayed him. Abigail is different. Abigail needs him, adores him. And besides, they have two things in common. Their secrets … and death.

‘A goose-pimply, page-turning read right to the end’ Company

Barrister Martin Ainsworth is sent to West Berlin by British Intelligence to make contact with his former lover, a suspected Communist agent, and it’s up to him to find out the truth and to spot her contacts.

As he travels through a divided Berlin, his dual role becomes emotionally tortuous, his lack of training an unforeseen hazard, and he turns more reckless than his peers had ever bargained for …

‘A more or less conventional spy story is suddenly turned inside out by a most ingenious twist’ Guardian

Antonia Winfield sensed someone was following her. She’d seen a man in a brown suit. He was even behind her in the travel agents where she’d booked her holiday abroad. But perhaps she’d just imagined things.

This year she was going on a restful, comfortable trip to a lovely Greek island – but that’s not the way things turned out. Mrs Winfield’s niece was going on the trip with her, and the two ladies soon had a third companion: the man in the brown suit . . .

What has happened to Aunt Violet? Helen Gamlen isn’t sure anything has, but when Martin Andras turns up unannounced on her doorstep one night, implying that her aunt has disappeared, she feels she should try to clear things up once and for all.
Martin’s interest in Violet’s fate is purely selfish: her house in Burnstone had belonged to his grandfather, who left it to his faithful housekeeper for her lifetime. When she dies it will return to Martin’s mother, and later, of course, to him.
But when Helen arrives on her aunt’s doorstep, she finds she isn’t the only person looking for a missing lady . . .