One freezing February evening, a Filipino barman named Ramon witnesses someone plunging from the seventh story of a luxury penthouse. Instead of calling the police, he heads straight for the apartment from which the body has fallen. It belongs to an old woman with a mysterious past, who could not get out of bed by herself. Superintendent Mike Yeadings and Sergeant Rosemary Zycynski lead the investigation. Searching for a link between a teenage drug victim, a missing care assistant, and an unidentified corpse, they discover further mysteries behind the glass wall of the penthouse. Other lives are threatened and the circle of menace widens to involve the dead woman's unhappily married doctor and estranged granddaughter. Clare Curzon's latest mystery masterfully unpicks the events and motives that lead toward the apparent murder of a woman already mortally frail. Her brilliantly fast-paced style keeps the pages turning as the chilling truth is gradually revealed. Genre veteran Curzon produces a tangled web of mystery from a cleverly concocted plot, out-of-the-ordinary characters, and a surprise ending. At 94, Emily Withers is incapable of taking care of herself, but she has a committed group of caregivers, including her grandniece Alyson. But that changes when a member of the support group disappears, and a shady insurance adjuster appears, claiming that he has been appointed to revalue Emily's near-priceless art collection. More mayhem follows, until Thames Valley Superintendent Mike Yeadings and his team arrive to unravel the mess. This straightforward village procedural offers solid entertainment for those who like to mix cops and cozies. Emily Melton Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved Clare Curzon has written more than forty novels under her name and also under the pseudonyms Rhonda Petrie and Marie Buchanan. She studied French and psychology at King's College, London. A grandmother to seven, in her free time she enjoys traveling and painting. She lives in Buckinghamshire, England. The Glass Wall Chapter One Sunday, February 3rd, 7.33 p.m.   The small man stepped from the lift, rang the apartment's doorbell and waited, his head close against the panels to catch any sounds of movement within.Utter silence. No one came. Was no one left to come?So it was real, what he saw from the road? Thought he'd seen?It could still be illusion, his recurrent echo of childhood trauma. But that only happened when he balanced on the edge of sleep: the memory of torture, of being forced to watch while ...No. This time he'd been awake, stepping on to the kerb and looking up at the tall building he was bound for.Who else had seen what happened? There had been no sudden panic around him, no screaming, no crowd gathering to point upwards to the penthouse window. With home-seeking traffic intent on beating the lights, and the sparse pedestrians burrowing against a sleety wind, was he the only witness?Or was it - as he'd feared after the first transfixed instant - a re-enactment inside his own head, a half-emergence of something demonic his mind refused full memory of? And now the recurring nightmare was visiting him awake. A superstitious man, he half-believed Hell could be black-magicked on him from the other side of the world and more than half a lifetime away.He knew again the same heart-clutching horror: gazing up at a height. And a body dropping out of the sky, turning over and over as it fell, this time silent all the way, disappearing finally from sight. Like frames of film in slow motion, while his body raced with terror. The same, but quite wrong, because this wasn't Sulu. No craggy mountains; just urban English streets, and for tropical heat a slicing wind carrying chips of ice to sting your face.He leaned his forehead against the door frame, compelling sanity to re-establish itself, wipe out the past.He drew in a deep, soughing breath, counting the heartbeats loud in his throat. Sort it. Act. Control the moment. And the door he leant on clicked open.He rang again, received no answer, then exerted soft pressure on the panels and went in. 'Anyone here?' he called, standing in the hall, ready, if challenged, to explain that he'd found the door ajar.Still silence, except for the central heating clicking into action, and behind it the low humming of a fridge. Even so slight a sound set his nerves aquiver. Tensed, he moved cautiously forward.The hall lights were on. Every door of the apartment stood open. He was free to walk through. It was the sleet-laden wind driving in from the darkened lounge that sent him in that direction. He knew then he hadn't been deceived. Because a panel of the glass wall gaped open.As he'd stepped off the pedestrian crossing, looking up, he had seen the old woman fall from her seventh-floor window. (But not into the street. The body would have landed somewhere behind the hangar-like building of the stationery warehouse.)Now, all senses alerted, learnt skills too