After a turbulent few years, war correspondent and journalist Alec Ballantine’s long-awaited peace and quiet is abruptly interrupted. The local vicar, Father Joe Dent, pounds on the door of Alec’s Battersea apartment, on a Sunday evening, claiming to have killed a man in his church.

Alec and his colleague, Philip Bing-Wallace, investigate and become entangled in an intriguing mystery, linked to the dazzling Baroness Freya Saumures. But Freya is not her real name … Alec is told she is Charlotte, a young woman thought to have been killed by the Nazis in 1940.

Alec finds himself plunged into in a world of deceit, vengeance and recrimination. He falls in love with Charlotte, despite her mysterious past, her treacherous uncle, and the murder of her husband.

HUGO WOOLLEY was born in West Sussex. He is married with two grown-up children. His mother was an eccentric picture restorer. His father a farmer and lawyer. As a dyslexic, he went to a myriad of schools, mainly because, in those days, dyslexia had hardly been invented, let alone treated. It was known as ‘word-blindness’ and dyslectics were thought to be ‘simple’ and below intelligence. How wrong they were!

Hugo is a caterer by training, ran various bars and restaurants in London before starting his own sandwich shops in the City of London in 1984 with his youngest brother, Oliver. In 1993 he opened designer sausage shops in Kent and Sussex, well before sausages became a fad. Unfortunately, after just over a year of trading, he was badly injured in a car accident and was airlifted to hospital, where Hugo remained for eight months being glued back together. Whilst in hospital he started writing, mainly about his experience during ‘my crippledom’ – as he called it.

In 2002, when Hugo was mainly recovered, he moved to Cornwall. After over twenty years running a boutique small hotel just outside of Padstow, with his wife, Hugo has retired and has moved to a quiet village on the edges of Bodmin Moor, where he continues writing.