Alexandra Manners

The advertisement, complete with a box number, appeared in New York newspapers: "Will anyone having information about an infant abandoned in Manhattan twenty-eight years ago please communicate?"-- Katherine Derwith had placed the advertisement. In love with a very proper lawyer, she had refused to marry him until she solved the mystery of her parentage. Somehow she had to find the answers to questions that had haunted her for years; Who had left her, a young baby, in a shadowy corner of a Hudson River warehouse? Why had she been abandoned? Among those who answered her advertisement was Carl Dietrich, a television newsman. Although he disclaimed any knowledge of her origins, he offered to help her in her search. Katherine, however, had an uneasy feeling that he was not dealing straightforwardly with her. Her instinct was correct. He had his own reasons for not wanting her to learn who her parents were - reasons that involved a secret so sinister that it could mean death to anyone who stumbled on the truth. Here is an absorbing novel of conflicting loyalties and loves, which moves from Manhattan's fashionable East Side to its dangerous waterfront streets, from a bustling ski resort in the Italian Alps to a lonely valley presided over by a grim portent of evil, the rock figure of the Stone Maiden

Last Act is the story of a friendly, gentle young woman thrown into an environment that is both unfamiliar and threatening. She finds her life at the Keyes School different and exciting, not least because of her new acquaintances--David and Erik, her suitors; Alice, her tutor: her schoolmates and her neighbors. But the air is fraught with inklings of danger that Hester comes to understand all too late.

JADE BENEDICT An aristocratic beauty, she was abducted on the night of her first ball and carried to the dangerous backstreets of London - straight into its nest of scoundrels, harlots, and dark desires... NICK CASPAR Sensual, ruthless leader of the underworld, he was determined to break Jade to his will, no matter what the cost. GABRIEL MASSON The dark, arrogant aristocrat, whose relentless pursuit of justice forced his love into the hands of dangerous strangers.

It was not difficult for Eve to fall in love with Niko as she travelled across Europe to Athens, chaperoning his young daughter, but always the shadow of Helen stood between them. Eve sensed that Niko's feelings towards herself were not indifferent. What was the mystery of Helen's death which seemed an insuperable bar to Eve's happiness?

Only in her wildest dreams could Helen Comyn hope to return to Gallowmerry. She had grown up a servant's child on the Grant family's estate, and had savored the memory of its elegance as well as her love for young Lennox Grant for long years after she'd been abandoned by her parents and forced to leave. Now, unexpectedly an heiress, Helen found she could go back to Gallowmerry. She could fulfill her desire to live among the Grants as an equal... .But the Gallowmerry to which she returned was not the fond home of her childhood. It had become a house of dark secrets and unspoken hatreds whose poisons had infected the entire Grant family. It had become a house of horror luring Helen herself to the brink of madness.

Mia Benson was twenty-one when her father died and she was left to face the future almost alone. So it seemed too good to be true when, unexpectedly, she came to live with her cousin Jan in the beautiful Scottish village dominated by the Tower on the hill. But their pleasure was marred by a malicious, unpredictable neighbour -- which was only partly alleviated by the good-natured Bill, who farmed the land behind their cottage and by Shaw Murdoch, the handsome son of a wealthy builder, who made no secret of his admiration for Mia. Not so likeable was Bain Alexander, nephew of the neurotic woman Mia secretly feared and whom it was impossible to avoid. Life in the village became insupportable when a poison pen letter arrived and Mia's efforts to trace the writer ended first in disaster then happiness where she least expected it.

When Harriet Jones arrives, late at night, at the lonely Spanish villa left to her by her seemingly penniless godfather, she disturbs an intruder who was hiding in one of the bedrooms. Her godfather's friends and acquaintances all come under suspicion when she reads a letter he has left for safe keeping with a Spanish lawyer, indicating that either in the house, or on the land around it, there is some object of value. She is attracted to both a neighbouring landowner, Don Luis Montalba, and Cay Martin, a geologist, with whom she spends Easter in Seville. Seville is beautiful and filled with crowds who have come to participate in the famous Feria and the sinister Procession of the Penitents, a procession in which a man is killed—a man whose uncle once owned the villa which now belongs to Harriet.

While spending the summer in the house where her aunt is housekeeper in the early days of World War I, fourteen-year-old Frances becomes involved in the house's violent past when she is "visited" by the long-dead twin of the owner's sinister son, seventeen-year old Martin.

A romantic novel set in the days of Jacobean intrigue. Kit Elliot is set upon by highwaymen and ends up a prisoner and then finds himself joining the highwaymen. A young woman by the name of Innocence helps him. A young lady by the name of Judith Burnham gets drawn into Kits orbit and a complex network of intrigue.

Sophie Madern, a successful freelance model, is invited to work with Ferdy Latour, her former employer and owner of a famous fashion house. She takes her brother, Paul, a diplomat, to the salon, where he sees and is attracted to Riba, a lovely but mercenary mannequin. The commercial photographs for Latour are taken by Jude Sagar, a man Sophie once loved but hoped she had forgotten. Sophie accepts a modelling assignment and travels to Istanbul, where, unexpectedly, she again meets Jude Sagar. And later, in Ankara, Paul Riba, Ferdy and the mysterious Mrs Demestre. A sequence of discomfiting and unexplained events culminate in Jude's invitation to Sophie to accompany him on a photographic expedition to the petrified, eerily beautiful, Goreme Valley. Here Sophie learns the truth and finds the valley's apparent tranquillity conceals fear, treachery and danger.