Curtain Call - Tapa dura

"This is an utterly delightful read, made to appear easy, effortless and brilliantly suspenseful, while never becoming predictable or cosy.... I can’t recommend this book highly enough." (Viv Groskop Observer)

"It had me on the edge of my seat. The only disappointment...is when the curtain finally has to come down" (Peter Stanford Daily Telegraph (five stars))

"Night after night for a happy week, Quinn filled my dreams with glossy surfaces and hidden vices, silk stockings and champagne and intellectual snobberies and long walks home on hard London pavements. Anyone who paces the West End streets will find them more haunted after reading this book." (Libby Purves New Statesman)

"Curtain Call is a beautifully written, absorbing work of historical fiction." (James Kidd Independent)

"Curtain Call goes from gripping you lightly to gripping you tightly. Both in its construction and its characters there is more going on beneath the surface than first appears." (Dominic Maxwell The Times)

On a sultry afternoon in the summer of 1936 a woman accidentally interrupts an attempted murder in a London hotel room. Nina Land, a West End actress, faces a dilemma: she’s not supposed to be at the hotel in the first place, and certainly not with a married man. But once it becomes apparent that she may have seen the face of the man the newspapers have dubbed ‘the Tie-Pin Killer’ she realises that another woman's life could be at stake.

Jimmy Erskine is the raffish doyen of theatre critics who fears that his star is fading: age and drink are catching up with him, and in his late-night escapades with young men he walks a tightrope that may snap at any moment. He has depended for years on his loyal and longsuffering secretary Tom, who has a secret of his own to protect. Tom’s chance encounter with Madeleine Farewell, a lost young woman haunted by premonitions of catastrophe, closes the circle: it was Madeleine who narrowly escaped the killer’s stranglehold that afternoon, and now walks the streets in terror of his finding her again.

Curtain Call is a comedy of manners, and a tragedy of mistaken intentions. From the glittering murk of Soho’s demi-monde to the grease paint and ghost-lights of theatreland, the story plunges on through smoky clubrooms, tawdry hotels and drag balls towards a denouement in which two women are stalked by the same killer. As bracing as a cold Martini and as bright as a new tie-pin, it is a poignant and gripping story about love and death and a society dancing towards the abyss.