Böcker av Deborah Lawrenson

A tense Cold War spy story told from the perspective of a bright, young, working-class woman recruited to MI6 at a time when men were in charge of making history and women were expendable.

Present day. On a lush Mediterranean island off the French coast, Ellie Brooke has accepted a commission to restore an abandoned garden. It seems idyllic, but the longer Ellie spends at the house and garden, the more she senses darkness, and a lingering evil that seems to haunt the place.World War II. Two very different women have their lives irrevocably changed: Iris, a junior intelligence officer in London, and Marthe, a blind girl who works in the lavender fields of Provence and is slowly drawn in to the heart of the Resistance. As secret messages are passed in scent and planes land by moonlight, danger comes ever closer. . . .

Combining the atmosphere of Jess Walters Beautiful Ruins with the intriguing historical backstory of Christina Baker Klines The Orphan Train, Deborah Lawrensons mesmerizing novel transports readers to a sunny Portuguese town with a shadowy pastwhere two women, decades apart, are drawn into a dark game of truth and lies that still haunts the shifting sea marshes.Traveling to Faro, Portugal, journalist Joanna Millard hopes to escape an unsatisfying relationship and a stalled career. Faro is an enchanting town, and the seaside views are enhanced by the company of Nathan Emberlin, a charismatic younger man. But behind the crumbling facades of Moorish buildings, Joanna soon realizes, Faro has a seedy underbelly, its economy compromised by corruption and wartime spoils. And Nathan has an ulterior motive for seeking her company: he is determined to discover the truth involving a childs kidnapping that may have taken place on this dramatic coastline over two decades ago.Joannas subsequent search leads her to Ian Rylands, an English expat who cryptically insists she will find answers in The Alliance, a novel written by American Esta Hartford. The book recounts an American couples experience in Portugal during World War II, and their entanglements both personal and professional with their German enemies. Only Rylands insists the book isnt fiction, and as Joanna reads deeper into The Alliance, she begins to suspect that Esta Hartfords story and Nathan Emberlins may indeed converge in Farowhere the past not only casts a long shadow but still exerts a very present danger.

A brooding, contemporary novel of secrets, lost love, perfume and Provence for fans of Tracy Rees and Jenny Ashcroft'A modern day Rebecca, complete with an eerie house ... and nail-biting happenings' ESSENTIALS

In the last glimmers of lucidity, Elizabeth presents her daughter with a gift that suggests a very secret history - one that leads Melissa to Kalami, where Julian Adie, poet, traveller and novelist, once lived. But what is the connection between Adie - an alluring hedonist who discarded four wives - and Melissa's mother Elizabeth?

In 1944 Tom Wainwright, a British soldier, arrives in the small Italian town of Petriano. Fifty years later Isabel Wainwright, Tom's daughter, sets off for Petriano herself, to attend a ceremony naming a piazza in her father's honour.