Jolted from sleep by the ringing of the telephone, Imogen stumbles through the dark, empty house to answer it. At first, she can't quite understand the man on the other end of the line. Surely he can't honestly be accusing her of killing her husband, Ivor, who died in a car crash barely two months ago. As the nights draw in, Imogen finds her home filling up with unexpected Christmas guests, who may be looking for more than simple festive cheer. Has someone been rifling through Ivor's papers? Who left the half-drunk whiskey bottle beside his favourite chair? And why won't that man stop phoning, insisting he can prove Imogen's guilt.
Author
Celia was born in Kingsbury, now part of London, England. She was the daughter of Heaver Fremlin and Margaret Addiscott. Her older brother, John H. Fremlin, later became a nuclear physicist. Celia studied at Somerville College, Oxford University. From 1942 to 2000 she lived in Hampstead, London. In 1942 she married Elia Goller, with whom she had three children; he died in 1968. In 1985, Celia married Leslie Minchin, who died in 1999. Her many crime novels and stories helped modernize the sensation novel tradition by introducing criminal and (rarely) supernatural elements into domestic settings. Her 1958 novel The Hours Before Dawn won the Edgar Award in 1960. With Jeffrey Barnard, she was co-presenter of a BBC2 documentary “Night and Day” describing diurnal and nocturnal London, broadcast 23 January 1987. Fremlin was an advocate of assisted suicide and euthanasia. In a newspaper interview she admitted to assisting four people to die.[1] In 1983 civil proceedings were brought against her as one of the five members of the EXIT Executive committee which had published “A Guide to Self Deliverance”, but the court refused to declare the booklet unlawful. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celia...]
