Crime Fiction
Rachel Ellis-Ward
Slow-burning psychological crime that uncovers the treachery in everyday life.
Rachel Ellis Ward (b. 1953, Halifax) is a British writer of crime and psychological fiction. She was educated at a local grammar school before going on to university in the early 1970s, where she met her husband, who would later become a successful screenwriter. They married shortly after graduating and have remained based in England.
Ward began writing in her thirties, initially alongside other commitments, and gradually developed a body of work centred on the tensions and uncertainties of ordinary lives. Her novels focus on character and situation rather than overt action, often drawing on domestic settings and familiar environments.
She has lived for many years in Long Melford, Suffolk, where she writes and continues to publish regularly. She prefers to keep her private life largely out of public view, allowing the work to speak for itself.
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On holiday in Crete, Elliott Fenn is trying to salvage a failing marriage with a villa, a hired car and a plan. The villa is a disappointment, the nearby hotel a temporary refuge. Ruth drinks, smokes, charms strangers and needles her husband; Elliott observes, adjusts, and keeps his thoughts to himself. When Ruth vanishes on a walk, Elliott returns to England alone with a story that explains almost everything. As the days pass, he must live inside that story, refining it for friends, family and the police, knowing that one loose detail, one careless remark, could bring the whole careful structure down. A Matter of Judgement is a cool, unsettling novel about control, chance, and the quiet, incremental steps by which a person can erase another from their life.
New York, 1955. In a narrow Madison Avenue office thick with cigarette smoke and the clatter of typewriters, Margaret Gray takes dictation, files contracts, and eats her lunch in Bryant Park. She is efficient, discreet, recently separated, and almost invisible. Then a late night at the office leads to a single impulsive kiss with her married boss, Leonard Densmore, and her ordered life slides quietly out of place. What follows plays out in hotel lounges, commuter trains, and borrowed weekends upstate, against a backdrop of Broadway marquees, subway posters and the new glow of television sets in every bar. When Leonard draws back, terrified of scandal and his watchful wife in the suburbs, Margaret discovers how far loneliness and desire can push an apparently ordinary woman. Months later, Leonard's wife vanishes on a routine errand. The police have questions, the newspapers have photographs, and nobody quite believes in coincidence. As suspicion flickers from husband to mistress and back again, Margaret learns the arts of silence, poise, and plausible denial. In a world where respectability is everything, guilt is hard to prove and harder to shake off.