Search results for ""Author Ethel Lina White""

A brand new edition of the classic crime novel that inspired Alfred Hitchcock.Glamorous socialite Iris Carr is on her way back to England from a European summer holiday and looking forward to the comforts of home. On the train to Trieste, she strikes up a conversation with the kindly Miss Froy. At ease with her new companion, Irene dozes off, but wakes to find that Miss Froy has disappeared from the train. Worse still, all of her fellow passengers deny ever having seen such a woman. Doubting her sanity and fearing for her safety, Iris is determined to find the vanished lady, but it seems almost everyone else aboard is conspiring against her, and soon she realizes Miss Froy's life is at stake...

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“Fear Stalks the Village has a sense of reality about it which few thrillers possess, and the characterisation is excellent. You will enjoy thrill upon thrill.” – Tatler “To the connoisseur of crime the name of Ethel Lina White is one to be spoken of with awe.” – News Chronicle Ambling along the lanes of a sleepy village in the Downs, passing cosy Tudor cottages rustling with wisteria, a novelist imagines the sordid truth hidden behind the quaint, rustic facade. Her musings are confirmed when a spate of anonymous poison pen letters shocks the community, turning neighbour against neighbour and embroiling everyone from the rector and the ‘queen of the village’ Decima Asprey to the high-born Scudamores. With venom in the air, the perpetrator a mystery and dark secrets threatening to come to light, a shadow of shame and scandal stretches over the parish, with death and disaster following in its wake. Revelling in the wickedness that lies beneath the idyllic veneer of village life, White’s 1932 mystery is an inventive interwar classic and remains one of the foundation stones of the village mystery sub-genre of crime fiction.

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'Then the rhythm of the train changed, and she seemed to be sliding backwards down a long slope. Click-click-click-click. The wheels rattled over the rails, with a sound of castanets.' Iris Carr's holiday in the mountains of a remote corner of Europe has come to an end, and since her friends left two days before, she faces the journey home alone. Stricken by sunstroke at the station, Iris catches the express train to Trieste by the skin of her teeth and finds a companion in Miss Froy, an affable English governess. But when Iris passes out and reawakens, Miss Froy is nowhere to be found. The other passengers deny any knowledge of her existence and as the train speeds across Europe, Iris spirals deeper and deeper into a strange and dangerous conspiracy. First published in 1936 and adapted for the screen as The Lady Vanishes by Alfred Hitchcock in 1938, Ethel Lina White's suspenseful mystery remains her best-known novel, worthy of acknowledgement as a classic of the genre in its own right.

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