Books by Eleanor Berry

A book of irony - a ribald black comedy. Note: This book was written between 1984 and 1985. At that time, nothing was known about the business regarding the Mirror Pension Funds. Never Alone With Rex Malone"s alternative title is The Bouncing Czech and the Good Man About the Hearse. 2054 is a summerless year after two nuclear holocausts. A year when The News of the World, printed in subterranean Fleet Street One, is sold with complimentary radiation-proof black rubber mackintoshes. It is in 2054 that Highgate Cemetery is visited by survivors seeking the vault of Rex Malone and his family, now a national shrine. Malone had changed his name. He was a former Czechoslovakian peasant and war hero who had made his fortune in post-war Britain. He was a publisher, reckless speculator and philanthropist. (Maxwell died mysteriously at sea in November 1991.) At the same time, on a Scottish isle, two prison warders discuss one of their charges, 101-year-old Natalie Klein who is doing life for a sordid and mysteriously motivated murder, committed before her life was linked with the Malones. Apart from being a murderer, Natalie was a bent funeral director in her youth. While still haunted by the memory of the murder, she had befriended Malone and his family. To repay his kindness, Natalie helps him achieve this end, using devious and perverse methods. The action returns to the Scottish isle where a gold-digging warder plans to sell the story of the mysterious murder and its murky motives, to the gutter press. A powerful, humorously-told and moving story of lust, murder, blackmail, friendship, and twisted loyalty. Above all these, humour, on almost every page, reigns supreme.