WHEN Anna's husband is offered a new job in the country, she's happy to give up her council job in Reading and join him.

A clean break seems the best way to rekindle her stalled career as a thriller writer.

But there's something about their idyllic Dorset cottage she doesn't like. And when Anna discovers, after overhearing some village gossip, that notorious child murderess Rebecca Fisher - whose angelic killer's face had dominated the newspapers 30 years before - used to live here, she gets the creeps.

Anna decides to turn it to her advantage, by writing a thriller about a child murderess living under an assumed name after being released from prison. To flesh out her central character, she begins to research the 30-year-old Fisher case. But as she digs, nasty things start to happen. It soon becomes clear someone wants the secrets of the past to remain hidden.

A slow-moving but genuinely creepy thriller, with an intelligent, angst-ridden heroine.

Updated: 16:35 Friday, October 28, 2005