Synopses & Reviews
Perhaps it is a blessing when Jasmine Dent dies in her sleep. At long last an end has come to the suffering of a body horribly ravaged by disease. It may well have been suicide; she had certainly expressed her willingness to speed the inevitable. But small inconsistencies lead her neighbor, Superintendent Duncan Kincaid of Scotland Yard, to a startling conclusion: Jasmine Dent was murdered. But if not for mercy, why would someone destroy a life already so fragile and doomed? As Kincaid and his capable and appealing assistant Sergeant Gemma James sift through the dead woman's strange history, a troubling puzzle begins to take shape -- a bizarre amalgam of good and evil, of charity and crime . . . and of the blinding passions that can drive the human animal to perform cruel and inhuman acts.
About the Author
Deborah Crombie was born and educated in Texas. After living in both England and Scotland, she wrote her first novel, A Share in Death, which was nominated for both an Agatha and a Macavity. Her fifth novel, Dreaming of the Bones, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and was chosen by the Independent Mystery Booksellers of America as one of the 100 Best Crime Novels of the Century. Her novels have been published in Japan, Germany, Italy, Norway, the Netherlands, France, the Czech Republic, and the United Kingdom. Crombie travels to England several times a year, and has been a featured speaker at St. Hilda's College, Oxford. She lives in a small North Texas town, sharing a turn-of-the-century house with her husband, her seventeen-year-old daughter, three cats, and a German shepherd.