There were things at Teind House that must be kept concealed from the prying world at all costs . . . Selina March has lived in the remote Scottish hamlet of Inchcape, with its mysterious Round Tower, for nearly fifty years. Brought up by elderly relatives, long since dead, she now lives alone, shunning the outside world as much as she can. But when she reluctantly accepts a paying guest, Selina's secluded life will change for ever. Crime writer Joanna Savile has come to Inchcape to research her latest novel by interviewing inmates at Moy, the asylum for the criminally insane situated nearby. Her secret aim is to question former child murderer, Mary Maskelyne, Moy's most infamous patient. Joanna's prying will yield unexpected results. For, although they have never met, Selina March and Mary Maskelyne are connected by a shared family tragedy: a terrible act of unspeakable cruelty that took place in India fifty years before. And there are secrets in Selina's more recent past, too. Secrets that are about to be uncovered with the most devastating and shocking consequences . . . 'Rayne handles a complicated story with many skeins very cleverly. A top psychological thriller' Good Reading magazine

The towers of silence, the third volume in Paul Scott's Raj quartet, takes us to an Indian hill station in 1943. The ladies of Pankot struggle to preserve the genteel façade of British society amid the debris of a vanishing empire during World War II.

A long-lost Sexton Blake mystery, 1920s detective fiction at its best Historian Gyan Prakash of Princeton University stumbled upon part of the unpublished manuscript of Tower of Silence by Phiroshaw Jamsetjee Chevalier (or Chaiwala, as he called himself) in the British Library. After scouring several Mumbai libraries, he found the missing pages. It is a thrilling tale that begins on a blistering April afternoon in Poona with the click of a camera shutter. An aerial photograph is taken from a small aircraft flying directly over the Tower of Silence. The Zorastrian community is thrown into turmoil and horrified grief at this heinous act. Beram, a suave wealthy man who drives around in a Rolls Royce but is a devout Parsi, decides to exact revenge. Thus begins a sensational cat-and-mouse game between Beram and Sexton Blake, England's most famous detective.

The jewel in the crown -- The day of the scorpion -- The towers of silence -- A division of the spoils.