Questions for readers’ groups

1. Is it history if it’s in living memory?

2. Was rationing good for the country?

3. We don’t know a huge amount about Lisabetta – what do you think happened to her during and just after the war?

4. At what point, if any, is it right to stop hunting war criminals?

5. Did advances in forensics put an end to the amateur detective?

6. Is Mirabelle Bevan ‘curiously British’?

7. How did the post-war landscape differ in 1918 and 1945?

8. Without the 1950s, could we have had the social changes of the 1960s?

9. Would you have let Delia go?

10. How different is the racism Vesta encounters to the racism she would encounter in British society today?

11. What is the fascination of a female detective? What can they bring to the genre?

12. How does historical crime fiction differ from contemporary crime fiction?