The past will always catch up with you… Robert – or Rob or Bobby as his aunts like to call him – is a child prodigy at bridge. After his mother was drowned at sea, the young master tactician was left to be brought up by her four responsibility-shirking sisters, Jacqueline, Peggy, Catherine and Sadie. All Rob remembers about his mother are her words of guiding wisdom, but unbeknownst to him, his aunts have made a solemn pact never to reveal exactly how his mother died. Finding himself in the reluctant care of his chain-smoking Aunt Catherine, Rob buries himself in his bridge. Head and shoulders above his adult partners, he is destined to become a Grand Master – and what could be better when life, he decides, is a bit like a game of bridge? Taking his theory into the world, the young Rob sets out on the road of life. And as he grows he discovers that bridge is not his only talent: he also has success with the ladies – all of them except his wantonly neglectful aunts, of course! One by one the four women meet unfortunate ends and Rob, now a feted TV celebrity as well as a chess genius, lands on the doorstep of another woman: the ambitious reporter, Rosalyn. But while Robs star continues to rise, Rosalyn struggles, and the green-eyed monster of jealousy rears its ugly head. Fame as a reporter is all she craves, so she digs and digs until she discovers the secret of the pact that Rob’s aunts swore to each other. And it will have devastating consequences … A Conspiracy of Aunts seeks to discover the dark forces at work in the mind of a serial killer.
Author
A pseudonym used by Alan Rustage. Sally Spencer is a pen name, first adopted when the author (actually called Alan Rustage) was writing sagas and it was almost obligatory that a woman's name appeared on the cover (other authors like Emma Blair and Mary Jane Staples are also men). Before becoming a full-time writer, he was a teacher. In 1978-79 he was working in Iran and witnessed the fall of the Shah (see the Blog for what it was like to live through a revolution). He got used to having rifles - and, one occasion, a rocket launcher - pointed at him by both soldiers and revolutionaries, but he was never entirely comfortable with it. He lived in Madrid for over twenty years, and still considers it the most interesting and exciting city he has ever visited, but for the last few years he has opted for a quieter life in the seaside town of Calpe, on the Costa Blanca. His first series of books were historical sagas set in Cheshire (where he grew up) and London. They were very popular with his English readers, but his American readers find the dialect something of a strain. He has written twenty books featuring DCI Woodend (a character based partly on a furniture dealer he used to play dominoes with) and ten (so far!) about Woodend's protegé Monika Paniatowski. His DI Sam Blackstone books are set in Victorian/Edwardian London, New York and Russia, and the Inspector Paco Ruiz books have as their backdrop the Spanish Civil War. Alan is a competitive games player who likes bridge and pub quizzes. It is only by enforcing iron discipline that he doesn't play video games all the time. He now lives on Spain's Costa Blanca.
