Betrayals

''Rewarding, inventive and enjoyably perplexing'' Sunday Times

A colleague writes an obituary for a fellow scientist and Nobel Prize winner, somewhat relishing his death; a train in the Scottish Highlands takes the wrong track during a snowstorm, resulting in a death, possibly murder; a publisher''s reader reports on a hospital romance novel that bizarrely ends with a gory, Ripper-style murder. Ten apparently separate stories are ingeniously drawn together to form variations on a single theme - obsession with the success of a rival and the plotting of his death.

But obsession is an unstable motive for murder, and the game of revenge can turn very sour . . .

Betrayals is an ingenious, mesmerising puzzle, intricately pieced together by a master of the art.