Pauline Beale

Octavio has never mastered the art of reading and his only knowledge of the world beyond the bakery door comes from his own imagination. Just a few streets away, Isabeau is trying to forget her disfigured beauty by losing herself in the paintings she restores. The two might never have met, but for a curious chain of coincidences.

On the stage of the Unicorn Theatre, a prop gun fires a very real bullet, killing an actor clawing his way to stardom using bribery instead of talent. The suspects include two unwilling girlfriends and several relieved blackmail victims. The stage is set for one of Roderick Alleyn's most baffling cases…

The author recounts her childhood, living in a tumbledown cottage in the Forest of Dean, where her father was a coal miner. At fourteen she had to leave her beloved forest for the city, bound for a life in service among London's grey terraces, where she met her future husband.

When Miriam Lea falls on hard times, an advertisement calling for private agents catches her eye, and within weeks she finds herself in Mr Bazalgette's employ as a private detective, travelling on a train to Hamburg in pursuit of an audacious fraudster.

Lena travels with her small son to the island of Naxos in search of her father Andreas, whom she has never met. She finds him living in self-imposed exile and slowly unlocks the secrets of his past and the dark realities of contemporary Greek history.