Like most families they had their secrets . . . And hid them under a genteelly respectable veneer. No onlooker would guess that Vera Hillyard and her beautiful sister, Eden, were locked in a dark and bitter combat over one of those secrets. England in the fifties was not kind to women who erred . . . so they had to fight it out behind closed curtains using every weapon they had. In this case, murder. 'Full of shifts and surprises . . . a modern novel with the Victorian virtues of a carefully devised plot unfolded for the reader with the most cunning art. Wilkie Collins would have admired it, and so would Dickens'. Julian Symons, Sunday Times.