Too Old for This

Lottie Jones is in her mid-seventies and, as far as anyone in her sleepy small town knows, she is just another retiree — a fixture at Sunday church and the weekly church-hall bingo, forever gossiping with her two closest friends. What none of them know is that, decades ago, Lottie was a prolific serial killer, and that the quiet, walker-wielding old woman they adore built this whole peaceful life on a new name and a very old secret.

That secret holds until investigative journalist Plum Dixon turns up on her doorstep, asking pointed questions about a string of unsolved cases and Lottie's long-buried past. Lottie has spent a lifetime getting away with murder — but doing it in your seventies, with creaky knees and nosy neighbours, is a different sort of challenge. And once one knock on the door becomes another, she begins to wonder whether this last job might finally be the death of her.

Wickedly funny and genuinely unsettling, Samantha Downing's Too Old for This is a dark comic thriller narrated by one of crime fiction's most disarming villains.