The Smooth Face of Evil Alice Armitage is an elderly, and lonely, widow. An unwelcome guest in the large house she helped pay for, she endures the cold, vicious sniping of her son's ambitious wife, who makes it clear she'd rather Alice was conveniently tucked away in an old people's home.
So when the charming and obliging Terry Brett appears on the scene, Alice is happy to believe that she has found herself a new friend who will liven up her solitary existence. For a while that seems to be the case, but Terry is a conman, and when he joins forces with Alice's scheming neighbour, Sue, their greed takes them further than they'd planned… ‘A genuine slow-burner running efficiently on greed, lust and desolation' Observer
'As plausible as it is readable, which is saying a lot' Punch
Paperback - Warner (2000)
Find Me a Villain A chance encounter with a stranger, Priscilla Blunt, seems to offer Nina Crowther an escape from her problems. Middle-aged, struggling to recover from the shock of her husband divorcing her to many a younger (and pregnant) woman, Nina happily falls in with Priscilla's idea to house-sit for her while she and her husband visit South Africa.
When the phone rings on her first night in the Blunts' Berkshire manor house she expects it to be one of her daughters, but when she lifts the receiver no-one speaks. All Nina hears is a shuddering sigh. As the calls persist Nina fears she has attracted an unwelcome suitor - or is it the man who is brutally murdering women in a nearby village? Or could it be one and the same person? ‘Find me a Villain is not simply about who committed a number of murders… Miss Yorke has used the detective form to write a sensitive novel about a woman coming to terms with her own life’ Literary Review
‘Miss Yorke’s skill lies in the way in which she weaves a few red strands of excitement and menace into the lives of ordinary people… It has the fascination of authenticity’ Oxford Mail
Paperback - Warner (2001)
The Hand of Death There were those who said he couldn’t have done it. Not decent, ordinary George Fortescue, the typical man next door. But the police thought otherwise. The women who were raped and murdered had been neighbours and he’d had the opportunity. Circumstantial evidence mounted up. If Fortescue wasn’t the assailant, who was?
As the police pursued their relentless inquiries, George Fortescue found himself accused of one of the most heinous crimes imaginable - and sucked into a nightmare from which there seemed no escape. While the real killer serenely selected his third victim. And then the fourth ... `A star in our galaxy of crime writers’ Financial Times
Pieces of Justice An idyllic cruise, a longed-for holiday to the Greek islands, a carefully planned school reunion…
In her first-ever collection of short fiction, including several pieces as yet unseen in print and a new Patrick Grant story, Margaret Yorke provides a virtuoso display of her ability to extract fear and evil from everyday situations. Effortlessly evoking the years of pent-up pain of an unhappy marriage, of a grudge borne since childhood, a sin committed years ago, she draws each story to its inexorable conclusion as Nemesis must surely strike again… 'Yorke's territory lies behind the net curtains of respectable suburbia… No crime writer compares in extracting unease, fear and evil from such placid surfaces.’ The Times
The Smooth Face of Evil
Find Me a Villain