Betty Shanks was brutally murdered 70 years ago. This book’s third edition reveals Betty’s secret life as documented in an ASIO file, which states that: - Betty was in an ‘intimate association’ with a young married man who was a member of the Communist Party of Australia. - Betty’s best friend from schooldays at Brisbane Girls Grammar School and at the University of Queensland, Winifred Cowin, worked for ASIO before committing suicide in 1958. - An ASIO officer arrived in Brisbane on Sunday 21 September 1952 to recruit Betty, only to be told that she had been murdered the previous Friday night. Ted Duhs alleges that Betty was killed by a man she met at the Grange tram terminus as she returned home from a night class at Brisbane’s Central Tech. This man, referred to as ‘the man in the brown suit’, was seen by four witnesses, including Marie Patton who is still alive. Minutes before Betty was attacked, Marie saw him 30 yards from the murder scene. Evidence suggests he was Eric Sterry. His daughter, Desche, is still alive, and in 1999 her story “My Dad Killed Betty Shanks” was published in The Courier Mail, after her earlier attempts to persuade the police were unsuccessful.

This book is about relating the concepts of rape and murder in both senses of the term; that is the way rape and murder are linked and related and also how stories of rape and murder are related or told.

Mystery crime fiction written in the Golden Age of Murder "An absorbing head-scratcher." —Booklist In the seeming tranquility of Regency Square in Cheltenham live the diverse inhabitants of its ten houses. One summer's evening, the square's rivalries and allegiances are disrupted by a sudden and unusual death—an arrow to the head, shot through an open window at no. 6. Unfortunately for the murderer, an invitation to visit had just been sent by the crime writer Aldous Barnet, staying with his sister at no. 8, to his friend Superintendent Meredith. Three days after his arrival, Meredith finds himself investigating the shocking murder two doors down. Six of the square's inhabitants are keen members of the Wellington Archery Club, but if Meredith thought that the case was going to be easy to solve, he was wrong... The Cheltenham Square Murder is a classic example of how John Bude builds a drama within a very specific location. Here the Regency splendour of Cheltenham provides the perfect setting for a story in which appearances are certainly deceiving.