Frances Hegarty Libros

Elisabeth is a picture restorer. This gives her the solitude and independence she needs - living and working alone in her flat. Despite her skills and reliability, Elizabeth undercharges for her work - valuing the worth of the paintings rather more than herself. Her ambitions are modest: beauty to look upon, unintrusive friendships and complete privacy. But when a mysterious and obviously wealthy man commissions her to restore his fabulous collection, an uncharacteristic combination of curiosity and financial need prompts her to accept his offer. Elisabeth soon realises her error, as the past and the present combine to make privacy her nemesis. As she becomes hostage to her patron, her lover and her friend realise they know nothing about her, or where she might be.

Isabel Burley returns to her childhood home to look after her mother, who is suffering from Alzheimer's disease. There she finds an angry old woman, prey to the threats of failing memory, the inability to run her own life and the local villains, who are eyeing her isolated house. The real threat, however, comes from within. Isabel thinks she has gone home to do good, but really she is looking for the love she lacked as a child. Isolated by her mother's growing dementia, the two women become locked in a relationship of hatred and simmering violence, with roots that go deep into the past. . .

Elisabeth Kennedy is a complicated, prickly ex-police detective recovering from a brutal attack of deadly acid - and a woman who is determined to fight back. Unable to escape the memory of her sister's murder, Elisabeth flees the stiflingly safe confines of her mother's seaside home to return to her own precarious existence in an apartment high atop a crumbling London bell tower. In her self-imposed exile, she assumes she will be safe, anonymous. But even the most cloistered places are not sacrosanct - especially the human heart. As she tracks her quarry through a London peopled by the pathetic and the poisonous, Elizabeth is headed for something far more chilling than loneliness, more savage than self-doubt