Josephine Bell
The Seeing Eye

Celebrated art critic Oswald Burke, who had upset many with his strong opinions, is found murdered in London's Westminster Art Gallery. The obvious suspect is an old lag, who is there for the purposes of robbing the safe. But David Wintringham and his wife Jill turn part-time detectives and soon find themselves embarrassed by a plethora of suspects, including two young artists, whose work plays a part in the solution of the mystery.

Roderic Jeffries
Layers of Deceit

The narrow escape of two English visitors to Mallorca when their car brakes failed on a mountain road; the attempted suicide of a Mallorquin girl; the womanising of wealthy English resident Steven Cullom and the row with his brother when one of the women proved unexpectedly resistant; the disappearance of a dog - all these facts seemed to Inspector Alvarez to be connected, though he couldn't decide how, to a death on the island which his instincts told him was murder. Superior Chief Salas disagreed.

My Irma has been kidnapped away and I am been in anxiety for her life ran the ungrammatical line in the letter which brought Mr Dyke and his companion to East Leat, a lovely village lost in the Downs. But Irma had suffered a fate worse than abduction. She had been stabbed through the heart. The distorted body - black, hairy and bloody - was that of a young chimpanzee. The whim of an heiress had drawn renowned psychobiologist Dr Paul Virag from the calm of his experimental station in Tobago to chaperon two prized monkeys, Irma and Leofric, across the Atlantic. He was furious at the interruption to his work - and he would have been more furious still if he'd realised what a sinister turn events were about to take.

Elizabeth Ferrars (1907-1995) wrote more than seventy crime novels and was one of the most distinguished crime writers of her generation. She was actively involved with the Crime Writers' Association, of which she was a founding member.