Set in the bleakness and confusion of post-WWII London, this gripping psychological thriller unravels the double life of a seemingly proper middle-class woman found strangled to death.On a damp July morning in 1946, two schoolboys find a woman’s body in a bomb site in north London. The woman is identified as Lillian Frobisher, a wife and mother who lived in a war-damaged terrace a few streets away. The police assume that Lil must have been the victim of a vicious sexual assault; but the autopsy finds no evidence of rape, and Divisional Detective Inspector Jim Cooper turns his attention to her private life. How did Lil come to be in the bomb site – a well-known lovers’ haunt? If she had consensual sex, why was she strangled? Why was her husband seemingly unaware that she had failed to come home on the night she was killed? In this gripping murder story, Siân Busby gradually peels away the veneer of stoicism and respectability to reveal the dark truths at the heart of postwar austerity Britain.
On a damp July morning in 1946, two schoolboys find a woman"s body in a bomb site in north London. In this gripping murder story, Sian Busby gradually peels away the veneer of stoicism and respectability to reveal the dark truths at the heart of postwar austerity Britain.
In 1919 the author"s great-grandmother, Beth, gave birth to triplets. One of the babies died at birth and eleven days later she drowned the surviving twins in a bath of cold water. She was sentenced to an indefinite term of imprisonment at Broadmoor.
Sian Busby's debut novel is a breathtaking feat of historical scholarship, which takes you to the heart of the Victorian soul. As Daniel McNaughten goes on trial, the dark forces lying beneath the surface of society threaten to break loose and overturn the very order of things.
The winter of 1843 is one of bitter strife for England. The nation is on the brink of ruin and revolution, the government struggling to stand firm against the rising chaos.