Spellbinder - Tapa blanda

West Sussex New Englander Dwight Delaney, traumatised by his mother’s unsolved murder, longs to blot out his troubled past. He leaves the States and buys a country house set in West Sussex woodlands. But he can’t escape his tragic memories. The springtime woods, serene and captivating, are calming. Dwight is thrilled to meet neighbours Valerie Brooke and her seventeen-year-old daughter Emily. But Dwight’s beloved dog Sheba noses out weird happenings in the woods. The uncanny parallels between past and present are at first startling, then uncomfortable and, eventually, threatening. Dwight recognises a disturbed personality at work and knows that this can only lead to tragedy. He warns Valerie that both she and Emily are in real danger. Valerie brushes his caution aside. But Dwight can sense evil lurking, feel it. Is misfortune shadowing him across the Atlantic? The woodland incidents escalate. Dwight’s troubled past alerts him that something terrible, sinister and completely overwhelming is about to happen. When it does he’s shocked into a new consciousness. The climax is as astonishing to Dwight as it is to everybody else.

Tessa Lorant Warburg lives in England with her elder son, his Thai wife and their three lively children. Originally a mathematician, Tessa began her working life as a computer programmer, then married an author who encouraged her to start writing. She wrote a series of unexpectedly popular books about her hobby of knitting under her maiden name Tessa Lorant, and patented two knitting aids. She is featured as one of a handful of knitters in Richard Rutt’s seminal A HISTORY OF HAND KNITTING. After her husband died of cancer Tessa wrote, at his request, her first non-knitting book, A VOICE AT TWILIGHT. This takes a look, not always solemn, at the experience of living – and dying – with the Big C. Tessa won the Oddfellows Social Concern Award for this book, and the prize was presented at the House of Commons. As family members kept telling her how like her husband the book sounded she thought she might be able to use that skill to write fiction. Tessa has now published six suspense novels and a family saga – a trilogy – set in North Germany and based on her mother’s family. And she’s busy writing more books, both fiction and non-fiction.