When a murder takes place in a secluded tower at Blessed Eleanor's Convent in Sussex and the victim is an old school friend, Britain's most popular TV reporter Jemima Shore finds herself in the middle of a disturbing puzzle. The dead woman, a nun, was to inherit one of the largest fortunes in Britain. Jemima walks into the eye of a worldly storm of fear - and the more she learns, the clearer it becomes that more lives, including her own, are being threatened.

Here, Jemima Shore, investigator and TV personality, arrives at Inverness Station for a Highland holiday. The sun is shining. Paradise, she thinks. But at that moment, she hears a voice: "All this way for a funeral." So begins an adventure far removed from Jemima's visions of heather-covered hills, crystal-clear streams, romantic men in kilts, fairy-tale castles....Instead, she is plunged into the strange world of the aristocratic Beauregard family with its tensions, its jealousies, and its violence, in many ways a primitive world dominated by the land and its possessing. The setting is the Wild Island itself, sometimes enchanting, but too often frighteningly remote; the streams, not silvery, but brown and sinister; her holiday home, with its disturbing, sometimes terrifying, influences; the people—the dashing war hero Colonel Henry and his sons, the forthright old priest Father Flanagan, Bridie the family servant, Clementina the wayward heiress...none of them quite what they seem. And then there is the specter of the Scottish "freedom fighters," in the shape of the self-styled army of the Red Rose. It all adds up to a brilliantly told story of mystery and intrigue on the Wild Island.

Jemima Shore is anticipating some peaceful research in the British Library when sinister things occur, a vicious murder and a disappearance. Jemima then finds herself involved in a tangle of possible motives and conflicting relationships.

Christabel Cartwright, a celebrated actress, had left her luxurious country house, its staff of servants, and her husband for a reckless affair. She thought she could come back without penalty. She also thought she could resume her career by starring in two plays. Her director was delighted, as was Megalith Television. But one person in Christabel’s circle was not glad to have her back. What happens next leads the elegant reporter/sleuth Jemima Shore through thickets of human emotions, in the larger-than-life world of the theater, on a trail of murder.

"With deft, wry prose and a credible plot, Fraser holds our interest and leaves us clamoring for more Jemima Shore mysteries."― Publishers Weekly In this tale Jemima is reluctantly shooting a TV exposé ― "Golden Lads and Girls" ― on the exotic lifestyles of overprivileged undergraduates. Among them is Lord Saffron, the wealthy, twenty-year-old heir to the former foreign secretary. When a confession by a dying midwife throws Saffron's birth and bloodline into doubt, Jemima's interest in the documentary perks up considerably. Then a student is murdered, drawing Jemima into a case that will demand the utmost of her skills of detection.

" We don't want to hurt her. We must remember that. All of us. She is after all innocent - Well, isn't she ? " With these words the leader of the secret group tries to establish the ground rules of its conspiracy concerning the bride, HRH Princess Amy of Cumberland, a 22-year-old British Princess about to marry the somewhat older and slightly dissipated European Prince Ferdinand. But there is more than one kind of innocence, and as preperations for the Royal Wedding advance, the group evidently has in mind some gesture which will call attention to the rights and wrongs of those who have no voice of their own. ".

When "Handsome Dan" Meredith plans to convert his stately Elizabethan mansion into an exclusive country club, his family, including Decimus Meredith—the ghost of the dashing, seventeenth century Cavalier poet, soldier, and viscount—has strong objections. Reprint. PW. NYT. K.

When the wayward lady Imogen Swain summons journalist Jemima Shore to her home, Jemima once again finds herself in the thick of love affairs—old and new—intrigue, and betrayal. For the colorful Lady Imogen kept diaries documenting her passionate affair with a rising young politician who has since risen to high ranks in the government. Increasingly eccentric as the years have passed, Lady Imogen now threatens to reveal details of the affair, and of the subsequent and unsolved disappearance of a young journalist. Jemima's meeting with Lady Imogen is the first step in a sinister series of events which will remind the reader why Antonia Fraser is the reigning queen of murder—British style!