In the six years since her first novel, A Question of Guilt, was nominated for the Edgar Award, Frances Fyfield has proved herself a master of the crime novel again and again with such books as Shadows on the Mirror, Not That Kind of Place, and The Play Room. On both sides of the Atlantic she has been consistently singled out by reviewers for the style and intelligence of her novels, the complexity of her characters, and the taut suspense of her plots. Now, with Shadow

Play, Fyfield gives us her best novel yet: a sophisticated, chilling, psychologically gripping tale about crimes of the most twisted passions. The odd, vaguely menacing little man called Mr. Logo is a familiar figure in the old court building in London. Frequently brought before the magistrate for indecent assault, he is invariably acquitted; he may scare the dark-haired, dark-eyed little girls he follows, but nobody can prove that he actually touches them. So he is

allowed to return to his everyday life - a life fueled solely by his blinding obsession with the daughter who ran away from him four years before: "It was all her fault. Everything. She had been his nemesis from the start, the black-eyed angel he had loved so much. Find her... and bring her home before the cancer of her loss affected all the extremities of his life and limbs. Love or revenge: either would do." Mr. Logo is especially familiar to Helen West, the Crown

Prosecutor who has just failed for the fifth time to make good her prosecution of him. He is off-limits to her now until his next, certain, appearance in court. Yet when she strikes up an unlikely friendship with Rose, the young, compulsively secretive, and promiscuous clerk in her office, Helen West unwittingly sets in motion events that will not only dangerously complicate and personalize her connection to Mr. Logo, but also push his rage and dark passion toward

uncontrollable and even lethal extremes..

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