Sarah Rayne – författare

Selina March has lived in the remote Scottish hamlet of Inchcape, with its mysterious Round Tower, for nearly fifty years. When she reluctantly accepts a paying guest, her secluded life will change forever. Crime writer Joanna Savile has come to interview the inmates at Moy, the asylum for the criminally insane situated nearby. Her secret aim is to question former child murderer Mary Maskelyne, Moy's most infamous patient. Joanna's prying will yield unexpected results. For, although they have never met, Selina March and Mary Maskelyne are connected by a shared family tragedy: a terrible act of unspeakable cruelty that took place in India fifty years before. And there are secrets in Selina's more recent past too. Secrets that are about to be unearthed with the most horrifying consequences.

Journalist Harry Fitzglen is sceptical when his editor asks him to investigate the background of Simone Anderson, a new Bloomsbury artist. But once he's met the enigmatic Simone, Harry is intrigued. Just what did happen to Simone's twin sister who disappeared without trace? And what is the connection to another set of twin girls, Viola and Sorrel Quinton, born eighty years before? All Harry's lines of enquiry seem to lead to the Shropshire village of Weston Fferna and the imposing ruin of Mortmain House, standing grim and forbidding on the Welsh borders. As Harry delves into the violent and terrible history of Mortmain, he finds himself drawn into a number of interlocking mysteries, each one more puzzling - and sinister - than the last.

Lucy Trent is used to having the legend of her glamorous grandmother unearthed from time to time - the infamous silent-screen actress Lucretia von Wolff, whose life ended abruptly in a bizarre double murder and suicide at the Ashwood film studios in 1952. Lucy rather enjoys Lucretia's legend - although most of the family would prefer it to be quietly forgotten. But when a body is found in the now-derelict studios, brutalised in a macabre echo of the 50-year-old case, disturbing facts about the past begin to emerge. Facts which point back to the eerie legend of the child known simply as Alraune. The child named after Lucretia's most famous film. The child who may never have existed at all. In the ensuing murder investigation, Lucy is to discover the truth about her family's dark and often poignant history - a history which spans the glittering concert halls of 1920s Vienna to the bleak environs of wartime Auschwitz. And at the heart of it all lies the shocking truth about the mysterious child called Alraune.