CHARLIE

**** A UK SUNDAY TIMES TOP TEN BEST-SELLER ***

Charlie is sixteen on the summer's afternoon she witnesses two men attack and cripple her mother in the garden of their luxurious waterside home in Devon. Her Chinese father, Jim, as dealer in antiques, is away on business, but it soon becomes apparent to both the police and Cha-lee, when he cannot be traced, that he cannot be the respectable and honourable man everyone took him for.

Charlie is soon to see her pampered, cloistered childhood is over now and that being clever and popular in school counts for little in the hard world outside. In the course of police investigations it transpires her father had liquidated all his assets before disappearing and Charlie has to face not only betrayal at his hands, losing the beautiful family home and shame in the community, but also the heavy responsibility of taking care of her deeply disturbed and crippled mother.

For two years Charlie manfully juggles school, a part time job, and looking after he mother. When she returns home one day to find her mother has committed suicide she resolves to go to London to find work, and to unravel the mystery of both her parents' past, and to seek out the real reason for her father's disappearance,

With the support of her student boyfriend, Andrew Blake, and the assistance of Rita Tutthill, a former night-club hostess, Charlie eventually stumbles upon the truth, but in doing so she faces terrible danger at the hands of Daphne Dexter, her mother's one time friend and father's mistress.