Frances Fyfield

After her husband's death, young widow and art collector Diana Porteous plans to rediscover her talents as a thief, as well as art expert, to recover stolen paintings. She begins with Steven, her neighbour's son, who is amassing works of art in London, including work stolen from his mother. But if Di is interested in his illicit treasures, he is equally fascinated by hers - and in the secrets still held in her house by the sea...

In a huge old house, full of precious paintings, Thomas Porteous is dying. As his much younger wife Di mourns, she knows that soon, despite her being his sole inheritor, Thomas's relatives will descend on the collection. After all, she met Thomas when she came to his house to rob him. With the help of an unlikely collection of loners and eccentrics, she sets a trap to hoist the family members on their own greed.

Elisabeth is a picture restorer. This gives her the solitude and independence she needs - living and working alone in her flat. But when a mysterious, wealthy man commissions her to restore his fabulous collection, a combination of curiosity and financial need prompts her to accept his offer. Elisabeth soon realises her error, as the past and the present combine to make privacy her nemesis.

Douglas Petty is a man who enjoys his reputation as an unreconstructed male with a penchant for too much wine and too many women. Inheriting his father's eccentric estate and dog sanctuary quietened him a little, and marriage to Amy a little more. Even so, it seemed out of character for him a sue a tabloid newspaper for libel when it printed a scurrilous story about him.

His lawyers told him he had a good chance of winning the case, mainly because Amy's testimony would clearly refute the story. But then Amy is involved in a horrendous train crash and while the authorities assume she died in the resulting fire, there is no body to prove it. And if she wasn't killed why has she disappeared and, with no money and no other family, where is she?

In a story of mesmerising suspense, Amy slowly reveals why she cannot return to her beloved home, and why she can never escape from the lies she was told as a child.

Young widow Diana Porteous has inherited a vast collection of paintings, but she feels without purpose. Then her beloved stepgrandson comes up with the idea for an exhibition of portraits with the title 'A Question of Guilt'. It starts as a joke, but soon they are preparing the huge wine cellar of the old schoolhouse by the sea, in spite of those with misgivings as to its suitability.

Kathryn and David seem to be the ideal couple: but beneath the smooth surface, splinters are beginning to form. David suspects one of their two children is not his own, for plump and naughty Jeanetta does not conform with the controlled perfection with which he surrounds himself. In an attempt to exercise some control over his world, he sends Jeanetta to the playroom - and locks the door, with harrowing consquences..

Crime writer Frances Fyfield and classical music broadcaster Clemency Burton-Hill pore over the hand-written scores of great composers to decipher the hidden tales of creativity locked within. Behind the hieroglyphics, scribbles and corrections on these priceless pages are clues that, when forensically examined by an expert eye, reveal the extraordinary craft, skill and inventiveness of geniuses such as Beethoven, Handel, Elgar, Stravinsky, Schubert, Puccini, Rachmaninov and Chopin. 

Accompanied by a team of musical sleuths, including world-leading performers, conductors, writers and graphologists, Frances and Clemency travel the UK, Europe and America to track down these rare and treasured documents. Among their discoveries are the manuscripts for famous songs like 'On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring', and some of the best-loved operas, operettas and musicals of all time including Madame Butterfly, Porgy and Bess, and The Pirates of Penzance. They scour the fragile pages of Bach's B-Minor Mass, so thick with music that the ink has burned through the paper; the ballet score for Aaron Copland's 'Appalachian Spring', revealing the changes made to please guest dancer Rudolf Nureyev; and a long-lost flute concerto by Vivaldi, rediscovered after being buried in an Edinburgh archive for 250 years.

Through detailed study of these, and many other, manuscripts, they reveal the answers to questions such as, how did Debussy attempt to capture the sea? What famous lines were adapted for their first singers? Why was one of Mozart's boldest lines crossed out? And did the shooting of a German diplomat inspire Tippett's A Child of Our Time? 

Inspired, insightful and often surprising, this is an unparalleled look at the astonishing secret history of musical invention - ink blots, doodles, coffee stains and all.