Blue Blood — Stevan Eldred-Grigg

Summer, 1929. Three young women are rocketing across the hot Canterbury Plains in a fast roadster: smoking, drinking - laughing. But soon all this is to change. In a plot worthy of a Ngaio Marsh fiction, lives are about to be shattered by shafts of jealousy, madness and revenge. The young Ngaio herself, seated at breakfast a few weeks later in the family bungalow on Cashmere, bites into a slice of toast and sighs with irritation as her mother rustles the newspaper and comments on page one's shocking story. Two young local women, severely mutilated, pots of blue paint spilled on the bodies... Stevan Eldred-Grigg's brilliant novel is a tough tale about a woman at the turning point of her creative and emotional life. It is also an enquiry - both mischievous and disturbing - into the psychopathology of a murder which might affect even the author herself.