Part of Series
Charmian Daniels (last seen in Murder in the Garden ), chief metropolitan police superintendent of Central London, interrupts a medical leave when beautiful Vivien Charles, member of a witches' coven, is found fatally stabbed in her home, her corpse surrounded by cult objects. An autopsy reveals that Vivien was pregnant and the fetus deformed. Vivien's fellow witches, still reeling from the shock of her death, are dumbfounded by the finding, but sexy Joshua Fox, the lone male in the coven and laughingly called its warlock, is unsurprised. When Charmian learns that the primary duty of a warlock is to impregnate witches, the hapless man becomes the prime suspect—until he, too, is stabbed in his home. Every clue leads to the coven, but Charmian is unconvinced, and digs into Vivien's past to discover a more pedestrian kind of sorcery that might conjure up a killer. Melville serves up a balanced brew of career politics, the occult, and the psychology of murder.
Author
Gwendoline Williams Butler (aka Gwendoline Butler) 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.
