Overture in Venice

Clare protested her innocence, but Venetian-born Guy Lombardi was sure she must be lying. 'It isn't usual,' he pointed out sardonically, 'for a tourist to become acquainted with a man with a police record, and yet another who is a notorious mob leader.'But that was what happened when, on the final evening of her week's holiday in Venice, Clare Lambert lingered alone to admire the splendours of St Mark's Square. And when she and her friends moved on to an hotel on the shores of Lake Garda, she found that she was being followed - and followed again - by men who were at best thieves and extortionists and at worst murderers . . .

Hester Rowan 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. Hester Rowan also wrote 10 crime novels as Sheila Radley.