Recommendations based on "Sinful Sorrow (A Mayet Justice Book)"

An alluring literary mystery full of secrets and lies, when an art teacher at a psychiatric hospital in 1960s England finds her life turned upside down by the arrival of a mysterious patient who has spent decades living in complete isolation with his elderly aunts in a decrepit Victorian house. Perfect for fans of Ann Patchett, Barbara Kingsolver, and Tessa Hadley.In all failed relationships there is a tipping point. It goes unnoticed at the time but can later be identified as the beginning of the decline. For Helen it was the weekend that the Hidden Man came to Westbury Park…The London suburb of Croydon,1964: Helen Hansford is unmarried and in her thirties. Something of a disappointment to her middle-class parents, she’s an art therapist at the Westbury Park psychiatric hospital, where she has been having a rebellious love affair with her colleague Gil, a dashing but married doctor.One spring afternoon they receive a call about a disturbance at a derelict, vine-covered Victorian house a few miles up the road. There the police find a mute, thirty-seven-year-old man called William Tapping, his hair and beard down to his waist. It appears he lives in the old house with his elderly, frail aunt, who expires as soon as she’s admitted to the hospital. No one knows why William has been shut away for decades, unseen by neighbors, with only his two now-deceased aunts for company. Westbury Park becomes his refuge.When it emerges that William is not only sane but a talented artist, Helen comes to see him as something of a personal project. But as she tries to solve the puzzle of the Hidden Man’s past, Helen’s own carefully constructed life of secrets begins to unravel...A gorgeously written and life-affirming novel about life’s delicate layers of experience and connection, Shy Creatures reveals all the different ways we can be confined...and liberated.

Dix Steele is back in town, and 'town' is post-war LA. His best friend Brub is on the force of the LAPD, and as the two meet in country clubs and beach bars, they discuss the latest case: a strangler is preying on young women in the dark. Dix listens with interest as Brub describes their top suspect, as yet unnamed. Dix loves the dark and women in equal measure, so he knows enough to watch his step, though when he meets the luscious Laurel Gray, something begins to crack. The American Dream is showing its seamy underside.

A charmingly witty fantasy adventure in the world of Strange Practice, starring Dr. Greta Helsing, doctor to the undead, who must solve a dangerous medical mystery at a secret French spa for mummies.Oasis Natrun: a private, exclusive, highly secret luxury health spa for mummies, high in the hills above Marseille, equipped with the very latest in therapeutic innovations both magical and medical. To Dr. Greta Helsing, London's de facto mummy specialist, it sounds like paradise. But when Greta is invited to spend four months there as the interim clinical director, it isn't long before she finds herself faced with a medical mystery that will take all her diagnostic skill to solve.A peculiar complaint is spreading among her mummy patients, one she's never seen before. With help from her friends and colleagues -- including Dr. Faust (yes, that Dr. Faust), remedial psychopomps, a sleepy scribe-god, witches, demons, a British Museum curator, and the inimitable vampyre Sir Francis Varney -- Greta must put a stop to this mysterious illness before anybody else crumbles to irreparable dust......and before the fabric of reality itself can undergo any more structural damage.

Can fear kill? There are those who believe so—but Amelia Peabody is skeptical. A respected Egyptologist and amateur sleuth, Amelia has foiled felonious schemes from Victoria's England to the Middle East. And she doubts that it was a Nineteenth-Dynasty mummy's curse that caused the death of a night watchman in the British Museum. The corpse was found sprawled in the mummy's shadow, a look of terror frozen on the guard's face. What—or who—killed the unfortunate man is a mystery that seems too intriguingly delicious for Amelia to pass up, especially now that she, her dashing archaeologist husband, Emerson, and their precocious son, Ramses, are back on Britain's shores. But a contemporary curse can be as lethal as one centuries old—and the foggy London thoroughfares can be as treacherous as the narrow, twisting alleyways of Cairo after dark—when a perpetrator of evil deeds sets his murderous sights on his relentless pursuer . . . Amelia Peabody!

The New York Times bestselling author of The Diamond Eye and The Rose Code returns with a haunting and powerful story of female friendships and secrets in a Washington, DC, boardinghouse during the McCarthy era.Washington, DC, 1950. Everyone keeps to themselves at Briarwood House, a down-at-the-heels all-female boardinghouse in the heart of the nation’s capital where secrets hide behind white picket fences. But when the lovely, mysterious widow Grace March moves into the attic room, she draws her oddball collection of neighbors into unlikely friendship: poised English beauty Fliss, whose facade of perfect wife and mother covers gaping inner wounds; policeman’s daughter Nora, who finds herself entangled with a shadowy gangster; frustrated baseball star Beatrice, whose career has come to an end along with the women’s baseball league of WWII; and poisonous, gung-ho Arlene, who has thrown herself into McCarthy’s Red Scare.Grace’s weekly attic-room dinner parties and window-brewed sun tea become a healing balm on all their lives, but she hides a terrible secret of her own. When a shocking act of violence tears the house apart, the Briar Club women must decide once and for all: who is the true enemy in their midst?Capturing the paranoia of the McCarthy era and evoking the changing roles for women in postwar America, The Briar Club is an intimate and thrilling novel of secrets and loyalty put to the test.

Sweetpea soon to be a major TV series starring Ella Purnell Readers LOVE C J Skuse 'Perfect for fans of a snarky narrative' NetGalley reviewer 'I absolutely loved it' NetGalley reviewer [Bokinfo].

The big new novel by the bestselling author of WHISPERS IN THE SAND: a gripping tale of witchcraft and romance, past and present, as her modern-day characters are caught up in a battle that has been raging for hundreds of years. Across the peninsular the mist rolled in, its icy fingers curling up the cliffs. Inside their houses people stirred in their sleep and children cried in the dark. The parish of Manningtree and Mistley has a dark history. In 1644, with England in the grip of a Puritan government, Matthew Hopkins, Cromwell's Witchfinder General, tortured scores of women there, including Liza, the herbalist, whose cottage still stands in Mistley, and Sarah Paxman, the daughter of the manor. And today the spirits of Hopkins and his victims haunt the old shop in the High Street, they say. Emma Dickson has given up her high-flying career to live in Liza's cottage, but now she is being driven half-mad by visions of the past; of Sarah's battle to save herself and Liza from the Witchfinder. In despair, Emma turns to the local rector for help, but he, too, is in the grip of something inexplicable -- something which threatens Emma. And, as the feast of Halloween approaches, Emma is caught up in a struggle that has been raging for centuries, as old enemies reach out across the years for their revenge. Can she stop the forces unleashed from the past wreaking their devastation in the present?

With her student days behind her and her career well underway, Sue and Bill, now married, together try to run a little hospital in the New England hills that was presented to the community by the town's wealthiest citizen, Elias Todd. Sue is Superintendent of Nurses, and her old friend Kit is helping her along with many of her fellow students from her years of training.After all the exciting nursing adventures these two girls have shared together, one might think they would find their new work rather tame. It is anything but tame for Sue, however, with that irrepressible street urchin, Marianna, as a student nurse; with Jean Ditmarr, sophisticated New Yorker, thinking she could put something over on the young Superintendent; with Dr. Bill so busy being a good doctor that Sue feared for a while he might not prove such a good husband; and above all, with the mysterious disappearance of the hospital sheets! Sue Barton is at her best with all the excitement and fun that this nurse seems destined to find in her nursing profession. The authentic setting of rural hospital life is the perfect backdrop for another great Sue Barton story.

A young writer, struggling for success, employs an elderly woman called Emerence to be her housekeeper.From their first encounter it is clear that Emerence is no ordinary maid.Although everyone in the neighbourhood knows and respects her, no one knows anything about her private life or has ever crossed her threshold. Only a great drama in the writer's life prompts Emerence to unveil glimpses of her traumatic past - a past which sheds light on her peculiar behaviour.The Door brilliantly evokes the development of the bond between these two very different women, and the tragic ending to their relationship.

Valerie Wilson Wesley’s Tamara Hayle mystery series featuring Newark, New Jersey’s number one private investigator are loved for their smart, sexy protagonist who “has a way with a wisecrack that is positively lethal” (Washington Post). Now in Dying in the Dark, Hayle is entrenched in a sinister investigation that will demand her best detective work yet.Tamara Hayle’s past has come back to haunt her–literally. She’s been plagued by terrifying dreams about Celia Jones, an old friend whose walk on the wild side led her to a horrible death. Celia’s teenage son, Cecil, begs Tamara to find his mother’s killer . . . only to end up dead himself, stabbed through the heart.The search for Celia and her son’s killer pulls Tamara deep into her friend’s troubled love life, where everyone adored her but somebody held a murderous  grudge. There’s her bullying thug of an ex-husband; a handsome ex-lover who woos Tamara with charm and lies; and an angry, jealous woman who claims that Celia broke her heart. And those were just the obvious people with axes to grind.Despite her better judgment and the admonitions of the police department, Tamara refuses to back away from the mystery surrounding her old friend’s death and the tragedy that met her son. All clues lead to the past Tamara shared with Celia Jones, and Tamara fears that that past will threaten her own son. But she uncovers more than she bargained for–and unearths secrets someone would kill to keep in the shadows.