The Brides of Bellenmore and Falcon's Shadow

In THE BRIDES OF BELLENMORE, lovely young Elizabeth Bellenmore comes to London to live with her wealthy grandmother. From the moment of her arrival, Elizabeth senses that beneath the elegant facade of the Manchester Square mansion lies a quicksand of unspeakable evil. Someone in her grandmother's house wants her dead! A pair of hands has reached out to push her down the curving stairwell that has already claimed two lives! To whom do those hands belong? Her grandmother, who considers honor more important than life? Aunt Geraldine, whose kindly manner masks a will of iron? Her cousin James, whose advances she rejects? James's beautiful wife Armorel, whose jealousy is akin to insanity? Or Mark, the man Elizabether loves...Mark, whose first wife lost her life so tragically at Bellenmore House? What is the secret of the Bellenmores that binds them together unto death, that makes a frightened young girl -- whom someone believes is a threat to that secret -- a stranger in her own family? .... When Loran Brant, heroine of FALCON'S SHADOW, learns that she was adopted, she leaves her nursing post in a London hospital to find her real parents. Loran's search eventually takes her to a lonely village in Dorset. There she meets elderly Mrs Cranmer, who welcomes her to her large house -- and hints that she holds a clue to Loran's true identity. There she also meets the dwarf Babette, who warns her to abandon her quest; Sarne Algar, Mrs Cranmer's handsome neighbor, whose wife has "vanished"; and Deborah Millbrook, Sarne's seductive "housekeeper." Bit by bit Loran discovers that all four -- as well as the silent villagers themselves -- were involved in her own vieled past...that one of them has committed murder to hide another crime, and would kill again to prevent its discovery! With her very life in the balance, there is no one for Loran to turn to except Sarne, whose strange magnetism she struggles to resist...Sarne, who might yet destroy her!