A decent and happily married man, Derek Cartwright finds himself dreaming of murdering his resident mother-in-law. And when by chance he meets the repellent Hugh Packer, a stranger who is also lumbered with an elderly dependent, what had merely been a midnight fantasy suddenly seems a practical possibility.
Like latter-day `strangers on a train', they could swap murders. That is Packer's idea, anyway: `You've got a problem, I've got a problem, and together we've come up with the perfect solution. The sooner we get the jobs done the better.'
Derek Cartwright knows he can never bring himself to murder anyone - not even an old man incapacitated by a stroke. But each time he thinks of his mother- in-law and how her presence in their home distresses his wife, he finds Packer's proposition more difficult to resist. After all, he only has to leave the old lady alone one evening - perhaps by taking his wife out to dinner. But then, there is the family beagle to be got out of the way . . . And that proves only the first of Derek's unnervingly difficult tasks, as he tries to set up a scenario that will deceive Detective Chief Inspector Quantrill of Breckham Market CID.
Sheila Radley's dark and gripping story traces the descent of an upright husband and citizen into blunder, terror, nightmare, and murder.
Author Biography
Sheila Radley is the pseudonym of Sheila Robinson, who 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. Her first books, written as Hester Rowan, were three romantic novels; she then took to crime, and wrote 10 crime novels as Sheila Radley.
