In a distinguished career lasting nearly sixty years, Ann Oakley has produced trail-blazing publications that span the fiction – non-fiction divide including The Men’s Room, made into a BBC TV series with Bill Nighy.

This novel is timely, set in the perplexing present of the constraints of the Covid pandemic. Locked down, Alice Henry is determined to decide what to do in her final years – an ongoing muddle of medical, domestic and romantic interruptions. When she stumbles on the unsolved case of social researcher, Maud Davies, found decapitated on a London railway line, she finds a new purpose. The blackly funny narrative weaves together the stories of the two women as Alice becomes obsessed with Maud’s fate and determines to solve the mystery of her untimely death.