Part of Series
Sometimes the door to the past opens gently—other times, with a terrible bang, and for John Coffin, it is the latter when a package marked with his initials is opened to reveal a woman’s severed arms and legs. Coffin’s own dark suspicion is that the limbs belong to someone with whom he had a brief affair during a rocky time in his marriage. Past ghosts or not, Coffin doggedly pursues the investigation even as an ominous spectre comes back to haunt him. When a second woman is found shot to death in her car, Coffin begins to suspect those closest to his wife, Stella Pinero, a famous actress who still manages to keep her own husband guessing at her secrets. As the Second City police force works to identify the first victim and make a connection to the second, unexpected events lead Coffin to the stunning unraveling of this bizarre crime.
Author
Gwendoline Williams Butler (aka Jennie Melville) Gwendoline Williams was born on 19th August 1922 in South London, England, UK, daughter of Alice (Lee) and Alfred Edward Williams, her younger twin brothers are also authors. Educated at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, where she read History, and later lectured there. On 16th October 1949, she married Dr Lionel Harry Butler (1923-1981), a professor of medieval history at University of St. Andrews and historian, Fellow of All Souls and Principal of Royal Holloway College. The marriage had a daughter, Lucilla Butler. In 1956, she started to published John Coffin novels under her married name, Gwendoline Butler. In 1962, she decided used her grandmother's name, Jennie Melville as pseudonym to sing her Charmian Daniels novels. She was credited for inventing the "woman's police procedural". In addition to her mystery series, she also wrote romantic novels. In 1981, her novel The Red Staircase won the Romantic Novel of the Year Award by the Romantic Novelists' Association.
