A Helping Hand. (Constable Crime Classics)

Josh and Maisie Evans are Good Samaritans and enjoy lending a helping hand to lonely elderly ladies. Auntie Flo had lived with them for years until her death, leaving the Evans's her Estate, such as it was. It is natural, therefore, when they meet Mrs Fingal on holiday in Rimini that Mrs Fingal comes to live with them and stays in Auntie Flo's old room.

Mrs Fingal, a wealthy widow, finds the couple a refreshing change to her resentful niece and their understanding and sympathy to her situation, her loneliness and need for companionship, makes them the perfect people to look after her. Moving in with them is the ideal solution - one that is satisfactory to all parties.

Beneath the suburban net-curtained world of genteel respectability, however, lurks the much darker and chilling terror of greed and exploitation - deadly currents that are masked by polite conversation and cups of tea.

'Celia Dale's writing is quiet, clever, subtle - and terrifying. I can't think of anyone whose stories of suspense I appreciate more.' Ruth Rendell

'The accuracy, understanding and quiet wit of Jane Austen - plus murder.' H. R. F. Keating

A Helping Hand was first published in 1966.

Born to parents who were both on the stage (her father was the actor James Dale), Celia Dale's first novel, The Least of These, was published in 1943 and she went on to write ten others. She won the Crime Writer's Association Veuve Clicquot Short Story award for Lines of Communication and A Personal Call and other stories in 1986 and worked on the Daily Express and the Sunday Express. She also worked as a book reviewer and a publisher's advisor and many of her stories have been adapted for radio and television. She lives in London.