Tom Ransome was jobless, on the brink homelessness and at his wit’s end when he bumped into Jeremy Eskdale…

The two men had not met since their days at Rugby, until that chance encounter in the Flying Fox which was so strangely to alter their lives.

For from that moment their lives were to become curiously entwined.

Tom, at the very end of his fortunes, found himself looking after the huge ramshackle country house which Jeremy's rich wife was trying to sell.

To Tom it was a stroke of great good luck, but while his two young daughters considered the new country life a haven, Tom's wife thought otherwise.

A world away from the sociable and wealthy life she used to lead, Kate Ransome began to deteriorate with the strain of being the sole source of income for the family.

Especially when — again quite by chance — Jeremy and his wife come to stay and Tom, good-natured obliging Tom, finds himself acting as their unpaid servant.

Jeremy, bored and idle, and the happy-go-lucky extrovert Tom amuse themselves with hatching absurd improbable plots.

A game that was to lead to the most terrible consequences…

But has it all been a matter of chance?

Does anything ever happen by chance?

And who was making use of whom?

A Game of Consequences is a gripping tale of a friendship and manipulation that will keep you hooked until the very end.

Praise for Shelley Smith

'Brilliant' – The Observer

'Stylish Thriller' - The Daily Herald

‘Beautifully Written' – The Spectator

'Miss Shelley Smith is among the most distinguished of those writers who have abandoned the detective story for the crime novel. . . The story maintains its tension to the end . . . What she has set out to do is done superlatively well.' - Times Literary Supplement

Nancy Bodington was born in 1912. Under the pen name of Shelley Smith , she wrote 15 crime and detective novels between 1942 and 1978. Smith is best known for The Ballard of the Running Man and its 1963 film adaption starring Laurence Harvey and Lee Remick.