Forty-two year old Chloe Smith is once more on her uppers when she answers an advertisement for housekeeper to a country couple, Sir Benedict and Lady Annabel Bowling. She little expects to end up, two years later, in the dock of Winchester Crown Court on a charge of murder.
It is part of the country familiar to Chloe since first being brought to Salisbury as a child by her raffish but musically talented father on his discharge from the army. And it was in Southampton that she first encountered the man who would become her husband: Zane Smith, an irresistibly attractive small-time crook who appears and disappears without warning.
Chloe's story, and those of all the characters who make up the colourful backdrop to her life, is told with Leslie Thomas' characteristic humour and warmth. The master storyteller has once more produced an unputdownable tale of love and life.
