An actress dies while preparing to tread the boards at the famous Theatre Royal in Bath. Her ex-lover insists that she was murdered. And perhaps he was right. Flora Messel had enemies and she had always been prepared to play cat and mouse to get what she wanted. When the Shepard Agency is hired to investigate La Messel's death, events conspire to get them entangled in a cat's cradle of mutual disloyalties - with undercurrents of malice and distrust...

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This volume contains three revised versions of Elizabeth George's short stories which were originally published under the title "The Evidence Exposed". Here there are also two new stories and an introduction by the author to all five stories of human weakness.

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A song from eighteenth-century Scotland that echoes down many generations of an Appalachian family is the theme of Sharyn MeCrumb's new Ballad novel.