Mark Aldridge

and then Hugh tells us I had laid my cigarette down with a quick gesture he, that's Gabriel, leaned across me picked it up and brought its glowing tip close to Isabella's arm she did not flinch or move her arm away revolted by Gabriel's savagery I could do nothing to prevent it

I saw Isabella's face slowly whiten with pain.

Her lips closed tight.

She did not move.

Her eyes looked steadily into Gabriel's.

And eventually, with a quick movement, he tossed the cigarette into the fireplace.

I apologise, he said to Isabella.

You can take it all right.

That obviously is abusive, but it's abusive on multiple levels.

There's obviously the physical abuse there, but it's also the fact that forcing someone to prove... He's like testing her.

So, Gray, if we enjoyed this book, which we have, what should we try?

No, I was thinking about, as ever, it's sort of crime or gay for me.

I was thinking about stories that have got these sort of... Or gay crime, like The Craze.

I don't know why these sort of instinctively came to mind, but I was thinking of the P.D.

James novel, A Taste for Death, and Ruth Rendell's The Secret House of Death, which is a terrible title, but quite a good book.

But what I was struck by in both of them was about sort of surface appearances and the sort of slow reveal of actually what might have really occurred.

And in the Ruth Rendell one, which is much, much shorter, it sort of revealed to you quite quickly about basically there's a whole thing about...

whether this person in this little cul-de-sac, this housing estate, someone dies and then there's somebody even having an affair or was something else actually going on.

And that's all resolved quite quickly.

But in the P.G.