by Barbara Vine (1997)
Jenny's marriage is loveless, and she is having an affair. She works at an old people's home, where she is especially fond of Stella, a woman dying of cancer - whose own secrets parallel Jenny's - with the difference that she may have been involved in murdering her lover's husband.
David Peace
The nightmare continues during the winter of 1980 when the Ripper murders his thirteenth victim and the whole of Yorkshire is terrorised. Assistant Chief Constable Hunter struggles to solve the hellish crimes and bring an end to the horror, but is drawn ever deeper into a world of bent coppers and sleaze. After his house is burned down, his wife is threatened and his colleagues turn against him, Hunter's quest becomes personal as he has nothing left to lose.
Margaret Murphy
When Megan Ward goes missing, suspicion falls on the stalker seen outside her house. The police would love it to be so simple, but the closer they look the more mysterious Megan herself becomes. They find no photos, no passport, no family or friends from an earlier life, only the corrupted computer files in Megan's strangely impersonal room. Meanwhile Patrick Doran, owner of Safe Hands Security, is living his own nightmare. A hacker has breached his computer network, where he thought he had safely buried his past. Then Megan's landlady is murdered - and the shadowy Megan re-emerges. The woman who doesn't exist becomes very real, very elusive and very dangerous.
Lisa Jewell
In a windswept British seaside town, single mom Alice Lake finds a man sitting on the beach outside her house. He has no name, no jacket, and no idea how he got there. Against her better judgment, she invites him inside. Meanwhile, in a suburb of London, twenty-one-year-old Lily Monrose has only been married for three weeks. When her new husband fails to come home from work one night she is left stranded in a new country where she knows no one. Then the police tell her that her husband never existed. Twenty-three years earlier, Gray and Kirsty are teenagers on a summer holiday with their parents. Their annual trip to the quaint seaside town is passing by uneventfully, until an enigmatic young man starts paying extra attention to Kirsty. Something about him makes Gray uncomfortable, and it's not just that he's playing the role of protective older brother.--
(by) Sara Woods
>The trial of Ellen Gray for murder comes early in the story, She is defended by Antony Maitland Q.C. and the jury's verdict surprises both Ellen and Antony >This murder has been committed in 1965. But it is evident to Antony that its motivation derives from a bizarre double-murder in 1946, when a woman and her lover had been shot dead by a jealous husband returning from the war; at least, that was the historical record. >Antony began to doubt the whole history. He began to think it odd that two murderers should have been found among the same small group, even if the crimes were nearly twenty years apart. So it is on this small group. the tight-knit clique who were friends in the forties, that his attention increasingly falls. >Then Antony Maitland moves from the role of barrister to that of detective, as he has done before. Supported by his wife Jenny, aided by his friend Roger Farrell (and as always derided by his formidable uncle. Sir Nicholas Harding Q.C.), he seeks solutions to the murders quite different from past convictions and police thinking. And at last, in a surprising and convincing denouement, he finds an answer.