Frances Fyfield: Cold to the Touch (UK 2018)

From the Publisher:
Beautiful, volatile Jessica has long since burned her boats in the village by the sea where she was born. She longs to return, but first she needs to secure the love of the powerful man who has spurned her obsessive adoration.

Sarah Fortune, her older, cynical friend, is keen to distance herself from her usual haunts and welcomes the chance to leave London in the hope that she might she be able to effect a reconciliation between Jessica and her mother. Pennyvale both charms and distracts her with hints of scandal and buried secrets, but it soon begins to disquiet her as cracks of distrust and jealousy show in the polite façades. Sarah is excited when Jessica tells her she is coming home, but she never arrives.

Sarah's instinctive knowledge of Jessica leads her back to the capital, fearful of what she will find. What she discovers reveals a truth more chilling than she could have imagined, but she has to return to Pennyvale to fully understand how Jessica was finally brought home, and why...

Frances Fyfield: Cold to the Touch. Sphere, ISBN 9780751574012 (July, 2018), 242 p., £8.99.

Frances Fyfield: Cold to the Touch (USA 2013)

From the Publisher:
A tense psychological thriller ideal for fans of Faye Kellerman and Louise Penny.
Things are not going well for prestigious lawyer and professional mistress Sarah Fortune. Her life is a mess, but it would be so much simpler to try and fix somebody else's. So when she meets the vulnerable and troubled Jessica Hurley, Sarah feels she must save her.

Jessica longs to return to the small village where she grew up, but she has burned all her bridges. Instead, Sarah travels to Jessica's cloistered hometown to repair the wreckage of her friend's past -- and to solve the mystery of why she left in the first place.

But when Sarah arrives, she finds that Jessica is even more unwelcome than she thought, and suddenly Jessica is missing, her number unavailable. Sarah's increasingly desperate search for her tortured friend takes her to places even colder than the grave.

Frances Fyfield: Cold to the Touch. A Sarah Fortune Mystery. Witness Impulse / HarperCollins, ISBN: 9780062301871 (December, 2013), eBook, 578 KB (ca. 240 p.), $2.99.

Frances Fyfield: Cold to the Touch (UK 2010)

From the Publisher:
Beautiful, volatile Jessica has long since burned her boats in the village by the sea where she was born. She longs to return, but first she needs to secure the love of the powerful man who has spurned her obsessive adoration.

Sarah Fortune, her older, cynical friend, is keen to distance herself from her usual haunts and welcomes the chance to leave London in the hope that she might she be able to effect a reconciliation between Jessica and her mother. Pennyvale both charms and distracts her with hints of scandal and buried secrets, but it soon begins to disquiet her as cracks of distrust and jealousy show in the polite façades. Sarah is excited when Jessica tells her she is coming home, but she never arrives.

Sarah's instinctive knowledge of Jessica leads her back to the capital, fearful of what she will find. What she discovers reveals a truth more chilling than she could have imagined, but she has to return to Pennyvale to fully understand how Jessica was finally brought home, and why...

Frances Fyfield: Cold to the Touch. Sphere, ISBN 9780751539288 (July, 2010), 242 p., £7.99.

Frances Fyfield: Cold to the Touch (UK 2009)

From the Publisher:
Jessica, Jessie, Jess, Jezebel - a beautiful, volatile girl, has been called all these and other names besides before she finally flees the village by the sea where she was born. This was home; a place of perfection. She's burned her boats there, longs to return, but not until she secures the love of the powerful man who has embraced, then spurned her obsessive adoration.

Sarah Fortune, her older, cynical friend, recognises Jessica Hurly's despair at the same time as needing to distance herself from their usual London haunts. She goes to Pennyvale in search of her own dream life, and also with the faint hope that she might be able to effect a reconciliation between Jessica and her mother. She is charmed and distracted both by the views of an endearing place and its corrupting contentment; but soon there are fissures in the polite facades mere cracks of distrust and jealousy, hints of scandal and buried secrets. Meanwhile in London Jessica continues her pursuit of the man of her dreams. She tells Sarah she is coming home. Then she falls silent.

When her body is found it is not in London, but in the butcher's shop at the core of the hidden village. The local suspects are glaringly obvious. Sarah's instinctive knowledge of Jessica, as well her own heart, lead her back to the capital and into places as cold and barbaric as any grave, all to find out who really saw Jessica last, how she finally came home, and why...

Frances Fyfield: Cold to the Touch. Sphere, ISBN: 9781847441096 (November, 2009), 242 p., Hardback £19.99, Trade £9.99 (?).