'I'm twenty-eight. I'm a freelance TV researcher. And last November I investigated my first murder . . .' Alex Tanner is always on the lookout for work - mortgages on flats in Notting Hill do not come cheap, after all. So when TV producer Barty O'Neill mentions a particularly juicy assignment she jumps at the chance. Barty has been asked to investigate the shooting of Lord Sherwin, a famous society murder of the 1950s. Although suspicion quickly fell on Sherwin's beautiful wife Laura the case has stubbornly remained unsolved. However Barty has a contact - Miss Potter, once governess to the Sherwin children - who is now ready to tell her story . . . And Alex is poised to uncover the truth behind a terrible secret kept hidden for over thirty years . . .
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Anabel Donald has been writing fiction since 1982 when her first novel, Hannah at Thirty-five, was published to great critical acclaim. In her thirty-six-year teaching career she has taught adolescent girls in private boarding schools, a comprehensive and an American university. Most recently, she has written the five Alex Tanner crime novels in the Notting Hill series.
This shrewd, unsentimental mystery features a multipart denouement, masterfully extended and deftly manipulated to segue into an examination of a family gone awry. In November 1990, plucky London-based television researcher Alex Tanner begins to investigate the decades-old unsolved murder of Lord Sherwin; she relies on the assistance (or is it manipulation?) of the former governess to the nobleman's children. Tanner interrogates such suspects as Sherwin's cold wife, their icy daughter, a fading actor, a nubile niece and even the governess herself before a sudden, unexpected confession abruptly terminates her work. Tanner believes the confession, with reservations, but then Sherwin's granddaughter goes missing and the emotional balance of the book subtly shifts. Sad details about Alex's childhood emerge as her hard-boiled exterior, which she has developed through copious readings of American crime fiction, starts to crack, and small crimes of coldness and cruelty replace the larger ones of murder and passion. Donald's ( Poor Dear Charlotte ) young, street-smart female sleuth, a rare breed in contemporary British crime fiction, is an appealing protagonist.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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