Mirabelle sat down, dropping into the cushions like a ball being caught in a large leather glove.

Didn’t young people care what the generation before them had achieved? And if not, why had everyone gone through those grim difficult wartime years?

If there’s one shade a woman of colour can’t wear it’s got to be the one everyone expects, hasn’t it?

She curled sideways into the milky light of the bedside lamp and began to read.

Nothing is long ago in an archive, my dear. In the records we treat the dead as same as the living. that’s the whole point of keeping papers. It doesn’t matter if it’s a hundred...

Jack had been the love of her life and he was gone. It seemed now that there had never been bad times, though she knew that wasn’t true.

Vesta was so good with paperwork – you could hand her a file of drab, seemingly dull information and she’d construct a story from it worthy of a novel.

This investigation felt difficult, like driving in fog.

A chap’s impending death has a way of focusing the mind.

In the middle section of the book Mirabelle breaks into not one, but two houses near Belgravia Books. I had fun scoping these out – checking which windows looked least secure and figuring out how...

Can I fetch you something, madam? A cup of tea?’In the old days she’d have been ‘miss’ and he’d have offered her a cocktail.

She tried to focus on the element of riddle or at least puzzle contained in the letter and ignore the sense of doom that was sweeping through her like clouds rolling to the shore over...