FFB: Mrs. Knox's Profession

Jessica Mann (b.1937) has a background in archaeology, Anglo-Saxon studies, and law and worked in various fields in the UK before turning to writing crime fiction with 1971's A Charitable End. She's also a well-known and respected radio and television broadcast, particularly her radio program, "Women of Mystery", and authored a treatise on women crime writers entitled Deadlier than the Male.

Mrs. Knox's Profession was Mann's second novel, and centers around Sarah Foster, a selfish, self-centered woman who is transplanted from her comfortable home in London to a Midlands suburb when her husband Jeffrey, an architect, takes a new job there. She and the other bored executive wives fill their days with outings at the tennis club, at coffee parties and gossiping. Then, Sarah finds an altogether different side of her new neighborhood, with wife-swapping parties and an affair with an MP, Victor Nightingale.

Sarah is also introduced to Mrs. Knox, a childless woman whose husband is away abroad most of the time and fulfills her loneliness by being a foster mother. It would spoil the plot to reveal that child-sitting isn't the only thing Mrs. Knox is good at, but Sarah finds out on her own when she is asked to look after a neighbor's child who promptly disappears. The kidnapping draws Sarah into a nightmarish world of intrigue, ransom, and murder that threatens to shatter her carefully-constructed web of lies and her marriage.

As Betty Rowlands notes in her preface to the Black Dagger edition, Mann defies convention by making almost all of the characters unattractive. Victor is greedy, ruthless and ambitious, his assistant is a rogue, his fiancee a calculating predator. Even Sarah's children are spoiled and demanding. As Rowlands adds, "Only Sarah's devoted husband Jeffrey, a kindly, hard-working architect, her shy neighbor Flora Millington, and ultimately Ms Knox herself, move us to compassion."

One interesting bit of trivia: Mrs. Knox's Profession was a 1973 Raven Mystery Award Winner for best Hardcover Book Jacket.