At Ruby's - Frank Delaney

Frank Delaney displays his storytelling skills at their most elegant and compelling in this twisting psychological thriller featuring Nicholas Newman, the hero of the acclaimed Pearl and The Amethysts.

At Ruby's is the third of Frank Delaney's 'Newman' novels. After The Amethysts and Pearl, Nicholas Newman, the architect narrator, once again faces violent moral difficulty.

Newman has married Claire, younger than him, frail and beautiful but with a dangerous history. Passionately, watchfully in love with her, he struggles to tell her of his feelings. Claire feels destabilized by her jealousy of the women he has known - notably Ruby Hamer, the Belgravia nightclub owner, a lover from Newman's former, wilder life.

Ruby now exhibits a claim to Newman that he regrets and she draws him into something deeper and worse than he has yet known. Meanwhile, a boardroom row provokes an unsolved murder, and Newman finds his client, the enigmatic and vicious Richard Strafe, involved in evil that comes straight from today's headlines.

Like all Delaney's novels, At Ruby's rests on several layers: a thriller with profound themes; a contemporary novel with (sometimes playful) homage to the mood of the nineteen-thirties spy-and-cabaret writers; a love story full of desperate, touching passion - and a compelling read that becomes impossible to put down, with twists to the last paragraph. Absorbing, passionate and riven with tension, the novel punches with blinding force as Newman is forced by shock after shock into a vortex of choices that determine his bravery - or his cowardice.