The Crime Tsar

Police Chief Constable Tom Shackleton is ambitious to reach the top of his profession, but no one is more ambitious for his future than his wife. Jenni Shackleton looks every inch the consort to a powerful man. Striking and groomed to gleam in any crowd, she is connected through her own job in journalism to the right people to further Tom's career—or so she thinks. She is also unscrupulous: Jenni Shackleton will stop at nothing to get what she wants. Next door and down on her luck is Lucy, whose husband Gary is physically failing with MS, so that she finds it necessary to act as housekeeper to Jenni, formerly just a friend but now also an employer, who somehow can't help patronising Lucy for wielding the household duster. What Jenni is too vain to see is that her comparatively frumpish housekeeper friend has everything that her husband actually finds desirable in a woman.