Christobel Kent

Alison is as close to anonymous as she can get: with no ties, no home, a backroom job, hers is a life lived under the radar. She's a nobody; she has no-one and that's how she wants it. But once Alison was someone else: once she was Esme Grace, a teenager whose bedroom sat at the top of a remote and dilapidated house on the edge of a bleak estuary. A girl whose family, if not happy, exactly, was no unhappier than anyone else's - or so she thought. Then one night a terrible thing happened in the crooked house, a nightmare of violence out of which Alison emerged the only witness and sole survivor and from which she has been running ever since. Only when she meets academic Paul Bartlett does Alison realise that if she's to have any chance of happiness, she has to return to her old life and confront the darkness that worked its way inside her family and has pursued her ever since. Strikingly atmospheric and compelling, this psychological thriller is about one woman's search for the truth in a closed community full of dark secrets.

The Crooked House

A RICHARD & JUDY BOOK CLUB PICK AND SUNDAY TIMES TOP TEN BESTSELLER 'Wow. This one will keep your bedside light on until the small hours - it's unputdownable.' Richard & Judy For fans of Apple Tree Yard and The Silent Wife, The Loving Husband draws readers into a marriage where nothing is as it seems... Fran Hall and her husband Nathan have moved with their two children to a farmhouse on the edge of the Fens - a chance to get away from London and have a fresh start. But when Fran wakes one night to find Nathan gone, she makes a devastating discovery. As questions about her husband and her relationships start to mount, Fran's life begins to spiral out of control. What is she hiding from the police about her marriage, and does she really know the man she shared her bed with?

The Loving Husband

He stole her childhood . . . she’ll take his future Something happened, she didn’t know what, something spun, the world turning, back, back, too fast. She would be sick. Bridget put out a hand to steady herself against the wall. Bridget has a secret—one she keeps from everyone, even her husband. One that threatens to explode when her childhood music teacher, Carmichael, walks into her dress shop. With him is a young girl on the cusp of adulthood, fresh-faced and pretty. She reminds Bridget of herself at that age, naïve and vulnerable. Bridget wants him away—away from her, away from that girl. But Carmichael won’t leave her alone, won’t stop stalking her. And Bridget’s not a little girl anymore. When he pushes her too far, she snaps. But what she thought was a decisive act only unravels more insidious threats—more than she could have ever imagined—and from which no one is safe, not even her family. The bestselling British author Christobel Kent has written yet another thrilling page-turner with a twisted, riveting conclusion. What We Did is a nightmarish, impossible-to-put-down tale of the secrets we keep from our families, of chilling childhood abuse, and of long-awaited retribution.

A Novel

What We Did

A Mystery in Florence

The Dead Season

Secret Life

When Beth disappears, everyone says she's run off with another man. She's just a fly-by-night party girl who can't be trusted. But Natalie, her best friend, doesn't believe it, not at all. She's sure something more sinister is going on. So sure that proving it just might kill her ... Meanwhile, Victor, one of Beth's and Nat's favorite bar patrons, has fallen and ended up in the hospital. When he hears that Beth is gone, he doesn't buy it either. And slowly, a hazy memory comes back to him. Something menacing ... something important ... something just out of his grasp ... As Nat tries to piece together the events--and people--in Beth's life, it becomes more difficult to discern who can and can't be trusted. The little town in the English countryside takes on an ominous air, with a threat behind every corner, outside every window. And someone is always watching ...

The Day She Disappeared

Meet Sandro Cellini, Florence’s answer to Donna Leon’s Guido Brunetti. One wet November in Florence, the grieving widow of an eminent Jewish architect comes to visit Sandro Cellini, good husband, disgraced ex-policeman, and recently turned PI, to ask him to investigate her husband’s suicide. Cellini takes her on out of sympathy, although this first case makes a downbeat start to his new career. There seems no doubt that Claudio Gentileschi, a Holocaust survivor and lifelong depressive found drowned on a bleak stretch of the River Arno, did take his own life, and initially Cellini imagines that his only duty is to support the widow through her time of mourning. But as Cellini doggedly retraces the architect’s last hours through the worst rains since the devastating floods of 1966, a young Englishwoman is found to have gone missing from the city’s community of hard-drinking, high-living art students, and Sandro’s search turns abruptly into something grimmer and more urgent than he could have imagined, as he uncovers a network of greed and corruption that is hidden under a veneer of tradition and refinement. The Drowning River is a spot-on, atmospheric new mystery, the first in a series featuring Cellini.

The Drowning River

A taut and absorbing thriller about a murdered husband who may not have been so loving after all Fran Hall and her husband, Nathan, live in a run-down farmhouse on the edge of the Fens, where they recently moved from London with their two young children. One February night Fran awakes to an empty bed and goes searching for her husband. She finds Nathan behind their house, lying facedown in a ditch. The ensuing police investigation soon singles Fran out as the primary suspect, and suspicions mount on the force that she may be hiding something that gives her a motive for murder. But Fran isn’t the only one with something to hide; as her isolation and paranoia increase, the claustrophobic town where her mysterious husband grew up begins to disgorge its secrets, and it becomes increasingly clear that Nathan wasn’t very honest with her about who he was. As police scrutiny intensifies, Fran must delve deep into her husband’s shadowy past in the hopes of clearing her name, and she doesn’t much like what she finds. In The Loving Husband, Christobel Kent, the author of The Crooked House, delivers another darkly atmospheric psychological thriller about family, secrets, and the lies we tell ourselves. Reminiscent of the work of Daphne du Maurier and S. J. Watson, The Loving Husband’s twisty, suspenseful plot draws readers into a fascinating portrait of a very, very complicated marriage.

'Suddenly, she felt the thrill of being in so foreign a place, far more foreign that she had expected; a place where anything might happen ...' The restored Tuscan farmhouse on the edge of an ancient wood is the perfect setting for a late September holiday. As Justine Elliott, ehr friends and their families from university gather to relax and unwind, she hopes it will be a chance to put the most tragic events of the prvious year behind them all. However, the apparently peaceful Italian countryside holds as many secrets as its visitors and, before the week is out, the past and the present will collide, with unexpected and dramatic results ...

Late Season

Untitled Christobel Kent 2 EXPORT

As Sandro gets to grips with the dispiriting realities of life as a private detective, touting for business among old contacts and following errant teenagers, an old case comes back to haunt him... As Sandro Cellini gets to grips with the dispiriting realities of life as a private detective, touting for business among old contacts and following errant teenagers, an old case comes back to haunt him... Once the subject of a routine investigation back in Sandro's early days as an investigator, Loni Meadows - the glamorous, charming and ruthless director of an artistic Trust based in a castle in the hills outside Florence - is found dead in circumstances Sandro cannot convince himself are accidental. However inconvenient his suspicions might be, both to Sandro - whose marriage appears to be disintegrating - and to Meadows's erstwhile employers at the Trust, he presses ahead with the case. And as Sandro attempts to uncover the truth of Loni Meadows's violent and lonely death, he finds himself drawn into the lives of the castle's highly strung community and the closed world they inhabit in the Casentino's isolated hills.

A Fine and Private Place

A Time of Mourning introduces Sandro Cellini, ex-cop and private detective: Florence's answer to Donna Leon's Guido Brunetti When a young English girl goes missing from among Florence's hard-drinking, high-living community of foreign art students, ex-policeman, good husband and newly-minted private detective Sandro Cellini is at first unwilling to see any connection with his investigation of the suicide of an elderly Jewish architect. But as he investigates the circumstances of Claudio Gentileschi's death more closely, the connections between the cases multiply, and Sandro's first case turns out to be darker and more complex than he could have imagined...

A Sandro Cellini Novel

A Time of Mourning

The gripping, unputdownable new thriller from the Sunday Times bestselling author of The Loving Husband Your best friend will always be there for you...won't she? Have you ever had that sense that you're being watched? And you turn, suddenly, but it's just a curtain, blowing in the wind? Or the dress hanging in the doorway? Nat knows something's wrong. Her best friend, Beth, would never have upped and left without saying goodbye to her. But no one believes that Beth was taken - she is a fly-by-night, a party girl who can't be trusted. No one's listening to Nat. But someone is definitely watching her...

From the bestselling author of The Loving Husband

From the Bestselling Author of the Loving Husband

In Deep Water

Viper

Loni Meadows is the beautiful, unstable director of an arts foundation headquartered in a crumbling castle outside Florence. When Meadows dies under peculiar circumstances, it becomes clear that almost everyone at Castello Orfeo would have been pleased to see her dead. Years ago, as a low-level member of the Florence police force, Sandro Cellini, now working sporadically as a private eye, ran a routine background check on Meadows, and he hopes that the tidbits he learned back then can help him determine who helped her to her death.

One wrong step and you're in deep water. Sukie has had enough of not putting herself out there. She has had enough of her mother thinking so very little of her timid daughter. On a whim, she accepts an offer to go to a Greek island for the weekend with Jake, a man she has barely begun dating. If that isn't putting herself out here, she doesn't know what is. Heather is at the airport when she sees a young woman with an older man - and immediately she understands that the woman is in danger. Because in fifteen years, Heather hasn't been able to forget what Jake did to her. And the next thing she knows, she's buying a plane ticket and following them. What should have been a perfectly pleasant weekend away quickly descends into something much darker. As these two women come ever closer to each other - and to Jake - it becomes increasingly unclear who will walk away from the weekend with their life. Praise for Christobel Kent and her novels: 'A highly superior slice of domestic noir' Mail on Sunday 'Spooky, gripping and affecting' Louise Doughty, author of Apple Tree Yard 'Echoes of Christie and du Maurier' Sunday Times 'Beautifully tense' Clare Mackintosh, author of I Let You Go 'Gorgeous evocative writing' Erin Kelly, author of He Said She Said

The new crime novel in the acclaimed Detective Sandro Cellini mystery series, which finds Cellini investigating once again "the savage passions and politics that lie underneath" Florentine society. (The Guardian) When private investigator Sandro Cellini is invited to attend a glamorous launch party for a luxury residence overlooking the glittering expanse of Florence, he has no idea what he's walking into. Behind the ancient and luxurious facade of Palazzo San Giorgio, there lies a series of terrible secrets; an old torture chamber, hidden for centuries in the bowels of the building, and a much more recent malevolence. The former head of security for this elite development has just died under suspicious circumstances and Sandro finds himself—quite literally—stepping into dead man's shoes. He soon discovers that other unsavory incidents have tainted the prestigious opening. When one of the residents is found murdered in her room, events begin to spiral out of control. Sandro must work to untangle the complex web of relationships that exists between residents and staff to unmask a deadly killer, in this superb new Florentine mystery by Christobel Kent.

Christobel Kent

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