Darkening Echoes: Five women meet in a hospital ward in West London. Beth, the successful career cook; Vivienne, the jaded socialite; sad Catherine with the domineering mother; free-wheeling Sally, the wild colonial; and Georgy, the New Yorker, a stranger newly arrived in town with the singular pursuit of love. Forced by cramped conditions into a shared intimacy, rivalries soon spark that will both pull them together and tear them apart. Five apples in a barrel ? and one of them is bad.

Grandmother's Footsteps: The cold-blooded butchery of a mother and her daughters triggers outrage in the media. This is just the latest atrocity in a series: an elderly spinster arranging flowers in a church; a bank manager; a yoga teacher; a social worker. Someone appears to be targeting the virtuous and clean-living. It takes the patient persistence of cartographer, William Huxley, to sense a link the police have missed and slowly unravel the puzzle. But then it rapidly becomes clear that William is the next intended victim ...