During their break, Maisie and Josh attach themselves to another pair of British holidaymakers – the elderly widow Cynthia Fingal and her rather selfish niece, Lena. Poor Cynthia is first besotted, then befuddled by Josh but he’s a lecherous old creep with eyes only for young woman and his sordid scrapbook. For more details, please consult the latest information provided by Royal Mail's International Incident Bulletin.

Nevertheless, everything I’ve heard about her work makes me think she’s in a similar vein – all the more so as you’ve backed this up! This book is definitely uncomfortable to read, especially when you consider things like this probably play out in real life all the time, but it works as an important reminder to be thoughtful of the most vulnerable people in our society. Just as the Evanses’ plan is ticking along nicely, another player comes into the mix in the shape of Graziella – a sweet-natured Italian waitress from their holiday – in need of a place to stay.D. James in her writing and next time I read any of her work I will go in with slightly different expectations. I found Sheep's Clothing a far better and more subtle novel and depiction of quiet crime but this novel delivers the groundwork. In truth, Josh has a hideously lecherous side to his personality, an unsavoury edge that Dale gradually reveals through the book. These cookies help provide information on metrics the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.

Auntie Flo had lived with them for years until her death, leaving the Evans's her Estate, such as it was. So when Josh and Maisie bond with Mrs Fingal, over ice-cream and gentle toddles, it’s only natural that they all decide she should must move in with them once home. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. She’s settled into our little home so well that I think it’s really only kind to leave her to her own little ways and routines. This story about an elderly lonely widow going to live with a couple who befriend her and who becomes increasingly helpless and isolated as a result of their machinations is well worth reading.

Reminiscent of the work of Shirley Jackson, Patricia Highsmith and Muriel Spark, Celia Dale’s A Helping Hand was first published in 1966.As Jenn Ashworth’s introduction to this new edition notes, Dale’s novel is tangled in the ‘the cold-blooded economics of care’ and the fact of how ‘easy it is for control to seep into our relations’. Lena, for her part, is delighted to have an opportunity to offload her aunt onto someone else, leaving her free to focus on her work and entertaining men, while Mrs F can look forward to mild flirtations with Josh and some much-need company to stave off her loneliness. I think it’s the apparent ‘normality’ of the setting that makes it so frightening -the fact that stories like this could be playing out behind the net curtains of seemingly ordinary and caring homes.

We use Google Analytics to see what pages are most visited, and where in the world visitors are visiting from. With Maisie’s background in nursing, the couple like to offer ‘a helping hand’ here and there, acting as caretakers to people in need, especially those with no relatives or other support. A middle aged couple take in an elderly woman they befriend in Italy, with no good motive behind their actions.

Every time the debate around assisted suicide comes up, we hear of the need for firm safeguards to be put in place to actively prevent something akin to this, where family members and ‘carers’ might apply subtle pressure to an elderly or infirm relative to sign away their life. There is something deeply unnerving about a crime novel featuring an ordinary domestic setting – the type of story where sinister activities take place behind the veil of net curtains in the privacy of the protagonist’s home. When Auntie Flo, who has lived with them for years, dies and leaves them her Estate, they head to Italy on holiday, to take in the sea air and let the sun soak into their bones. Josh and Maisie Evans are Good Samaritans and enjoy lending a helping hand to lonely elderly ladies.