The killing way

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Carola Dunn

Eleanor Trewynn is a recently retired widow who has moved to the small village of Port Mabyn in Cornwall. Neither frail nor retiring, after a lifetime of traveling the world, she’s ready for an uneventful life with her dog and friends in this quiet town. Unfortunately, excitement seems to happen around her. Her friend and neighbor, artist Nick Gresham, returns from a trip only to find several of his paintings slashed, reportedly by rival local artist Geoffrey Clarke. When Nick goes to have it out with him, with Eleanor in tow, they find Clarke’s body in his studio, fatally stabbed in the back. Accused of the crime, Nick ends up in jail, while Detective Inspector Scumble and DSMegan Pencarrow, Eleanor’s niece, investigate. But Eleanor isn’t leaving anything to chance—she starts doing a little investigating of her own, and soon learns that Nick is far from the only one with a compelling motive for murder.

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Ruth Rendell

Few people under the age of seventeen have read the whole of Virgil in Latin and witnessed two murders. But Liza Beck is no ordinary teenager. She has grown up alone with her mother, Eve, in the remote gatekeeper's cottage of magnificent Shrove House. Here Liza has been nourished by books and her mother's obsessive love, carefully shielded from the "contamination" of the outside world. No newpapers, no TV, no phone, no car, no school. Liza knows perfectly well she can never leave Shrove House, or her mother, to go with the handsome young drifter who tends the garden. Then one day the police come and take Eve away forever—and now Sean Holford will find out, little by little, all about Liza's past and her mother's fierce, mysterious claim to Shrove House. And to his growing horror, he'll learn about all the men who came there-and never left alive.

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Olive Etchells

In a small village on the incomparable Roseland Peninsula of Cornwall sits an old round house by the sea, beloved home of the Baxter family-relative newcomers to this lovely land. The close-knit farming community has been kindly, and has taken the new arrivals to its heart. But then a murder takes place. The body of a teenage girl is washed up on the beach, discovered by the Baxters' younger son.DCI Channon-quiet compassion masking a clever mind-is the investigating officer on the case. His assistant, Sergeant Bowles, is his very opposite: abrasive, cynical, and keen to pin the crime on Luke, the Baxters' older son.And so a violent crime changes the lives of everyone it troubles. Sally Baxter finds herself protecting one son and fighting for the other, while trying to fathom her husband's odd attitude toward the murder. Then there are the devastated parents of the murdered girl and the wide mixture of reactions from their farming neighbors. And through all the mayhem, there is DCI Channon, trying to make some sense of a seemingly impossible task as he finds himself increasingly drawn to the family at the round house, and especially to Sally herself.

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C.S. Forester

The Pursued is set against the quiet London suburbs of the 1930s and the daily life of a seemingly happy married couple. The prose is fast, pared-down and psychologically loaded, creating its own brand of English noir. Opening with a mysterious death, the plot reveals the inner workings of Marjorie and Ted's marriage, flecked with domestic abuse and sexual sado-masochism. Its thriller elements are blended with radical gender politics through this channel of disgruntled domesticity. A reader coming new to C S Forester might be forgiven for thinking this writer a woman. The domestic drudgery of Marjorie's everyday life is imagined in minute detail – the washing, cooking, shopping, the children, and the husband's tyrannical demands. The fulminating passions, the quiet rage, and the burning desire for violent revenge belongs largely to the disenfranchised female characters. Marjorie looks at her spinster friends – the newly independent, career-minded women of the 1930s – with a fear that she overcomes. Her mother, seemingly mild and meek, seethes with the sly, unquenchable vengeance of Clytemnestra.