A superb set of short stories by a master storyteller.

For a detailed review please click on the link below:

http://onerightword.blogspot.co.uk/2015/11/tales-of-murder-and-mystery-susan.htm... ( )

These three novels have only murder in common. The Shrouded Walls is a "woman in front of the house" book -- in my youth (and perhaps still), the book jackets of such books were prone to feature a young woman in a flowing gown standing in front of a large, menacing dwelling. Plotwise, it has features in common with Georgette Heyer's Regency romances, with the addition of a sense of menace that becomes all too real. But Howatch, at least at that point in her career, did not write historical characters well. Although the protagonists make a marriage of convenience, they seem to talk and think not very differently from their 1960s counterparts in the other two books bound with this one.

In April's Grave, a woman who believes her twin sister maliciously broke up her marriage realizes three years later that the sister (April) hasn't been seen or heard from since. On a trip back to England, she and her (not-yet-divorced) husband decide to try for a reconciliation -- but can she get past her suspicions about whether April is still alive? Well-plotted, and without the anachronisms that plague The Shrouded Walls.

The Devil on Lammas Night is something else again -- a romantic suspense thriller with more than a touch of the supernatural. Susan Howatch had been known to me for a good many years as someone who wrote books my mother liked to read for relaxation, until I happened on her Starbridge series and the three related books that followed it (they deal with factions in the Church of England and the personalities of various adherents, and if you think this sounds dull, all I can say is they kept me reading feverishly till the end.) In The Devil on Lammas Night, I saw inklings of Howatch's interest in the problem of evil and her belief in its supernatural existence. All three books kept me interested, but none held a candle to the later works. ( )