Related to: 'The Middle-Class ABC'

Michael Parkinson has described Victoria Mather and Sue Macartney-Snape as 'not so much observers, more collectors, pinning their victims like butterflies in a display cabinet. Their observations are made with the wit and humour necessary to survive the circles they move in.' True to form, The Appalling Guests offers the chance to delight in yet another array of social stereotypes, from supermodel Tweetie's baby shower (the editor of Vogue has bought a leather nappy bag with organic nappy rash unguents wrapped in silver cellophane and sequins) to the Chalfont St Oswald amateur dramatics society staging of Little Red Riding Hood with leading light Pam, who has written it, directed it, designed the costumes and given herself the leading role.You'll recognise them all -- the back seat driver, the beautiful boy at the gym, the merchant banker, the Archers addict and the competitive mother. And thanks to The Appalling Guests, you'll know how to avoid them.

In OSCAR WILDE AND THE RING OF DEATH, the second in Gyles Brandreth's acclaimed Oscar Wilde Murder Mysteries series featuring Oscar Wilde and Arthur Conan Doyle, a parlour game of 'Murder' has lethal consequences... 'Intelligent, amusing and entertaining' Alexander McCall Smith 'I see murder in this unhappy hand...' When Mrs Robinson, palmist to the Prince of Wales, reads Oscar Wilde's palm she cannot know what she has predicted.   Nor can Oscar know what he has set in motion when, that same evening, he proposes a game of 'Murder' in which each of his Sunday Supper Club guests must write down those whom they would like to kill.  For the fourteen 'victims' begin to die mysteriously, one by one, and in the order in which their names were drawn from the bag... With growing horror, Wilde and his confidantes Robert Sherard and Arthur Conan Doyle, realise that one of their guests that evening must be the murderer.  In a race against time, Wilde will need all his powers of deduction and knowledge of human behaviour before he himself - the thirteenth name on the list - becomes the killer's next victim.