by Nicola Upson
Summer, 1936: Josephine Tey joins her friends in the resort village of Portmeirion to celebrate her fortieth birthday. Alfred Hitchcock and his wife, Alma Reville, are there to sign a deal to film Josephine's novel, A Shilling for Candles, and Alfred Hitchcock has one or two tricks up his sleeve to keep the holiday party entertained - and expose their deepest fears. But things get out of hand when one of Hollywood's leading actresses is brutally slashed to death in a cemetery near the village. The following day, fear and suspicion take over in a setting where nothing - and no one - is quite what it seems.
Based in part on the life of Josephine Tey - one of the most popular, best-loved crime writers of the Golden Age, Nicola Upson's Fear in the Sunlight features legendary film director Alfred Hitchcock as a prominent character - and features the classic suspense and psychological tension that fans of Hitchcock films love.
"Starred Review. The brief prologue's account of the carnage to come in the sections set in 1936 Wales enables Upson effectively to delay the reader's gratification and to develop a large cast of fully realized characters. The melancholy tone and pitch-perfect prose add depth to the sinister plot." - Publishers Weekly
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Nicola Upson was born in Suffolk and read English at Downing College, Cambridge. She has worked in theatre and as a freelance journalist, and is the author of two non-fiction works and the recipient of an Escalator Award from the Arts Council England. Her debut novel, An Expert in Murder, was the first in a series of crime novels to feature Josephine Tey--one of the leading authors of Britain's age of crime-writing. Her research for the books has included many conversations with people who lived through the period and who knew Josephine Tey well, most notably Sir John Gielgud. The book was dramatised by BBC Scotland for Woman's Hour, and praised by PD James as marking "the arrival of a new and assured talent". Nicola lives with her partner in Cambridge and Cornwall.
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