Margaret Millar: A Stranger in My Grave (UK 2019)

From the Publisher:
A nightmare is haunting Daisy Harker. Night after night she walks a strange cemetery in her dreams, until she comes to a grave that stops her in her tracks. It's Daisy's own, and according to the dates on the gravestone she's been dead for four years.

What can this nightmare mean, and why is Daisy's husband so insistent that she forget it? Driven to desperation, she hires a private investigator to reconstruct the day of her dream death. But as she pieces her past together, her present begins to fall apart...

"Stunningly original" -- Val McDermid
"In the whole of crime fiction's distinguished sisterhood, there is no one quite like Margaret Millar" -- Guardian
"One of the most original and vital voices in all of American crime fiction" -- Laura Lippman, author of 'Sunburn'

Margaret Millar: A Stranger in My Grave. A classic psychological thriller. Pushkin Press, ISBN: 9781782275732 (July, 2019), Pushkin Vertigo, 320 p., £9.99, eBook £6.99 (?).

Margaret Millar: A Stranger in My Grave (USA 2018)

From the Publisher:
Young housewife Daisy Harker's world is upended when a blank spot in her memory and a reoccurring nightmare link her to an unsolved murder and a decades-old conspiracy

Jim and Daisy Harker are a young, well-to-do couple in San Felice, California, and though childless they maintain the sort of domestic happiness that others can only aspire to. But a darkness exists at the outer edges of Daisy's mind and she has no idea why it's there. In a series of reoccurring nightmares she wanders a cemetery, eventually finding her own gravestone. According to the dream, December 2nd, 1955 is the day she died.

Street smart but honorable, Stevens Pinata is a man with his own mysteries. An orphan left on a church doorstep as a child, he isn't even certain of his ethnicity, let alone his goals in life. As a private investigator he works with bail bonds and quick shakedowns. But when a pretty young woman like Daisy Harker comes into his office with a crazy request to "find her lost day" he is intrigued. He is too decent to take advantage of a crazy woman, but Mr. Harker is a wealthy man and who is Pinata to turn down money?

What unfolds is a masterpiece of suspense and one of the books that forever changed the domestic thriller. Millar's razor sharp prose cuts a masterful plot and slashes at the racism, sexism, and entitlement endemic to an era otherwise celebrated for its prosperity.

Margaret Millar: A Stranger in My Grave. Soho Syndicate, ISBN: 9781681990385 (April, 2018), 354 p., $14.95.

Margaret Millar: A Stranger in My Grave (USA 2016)

From the Publisher:
Young housewife Daisy Harker's world is upended when a blank spot in her memory and a reoccurring nightmare link her to an unsolved murder and a decades-old conspiracy

Jim and Daisy Harker are a young, well-to-do couple in San Felice, California, and though childless they maintain the sort of domestic happiness that others can only aspire to. But a darkness exists at the outer edges of Daisy's mind and she has no idea why it's there. In a series of reoccurring nightmares she wanders a cemetery, eventually finding her own gravestone. According to the dream, December 2nd, 1955 is the day she died.

Street smart but honorable, Stevens Pinata is a man with his own mysteries. An orphan left on a church doorstep as a child, he isn't even certain of his ethnicity, let alone his goals in life. As a private investigator he works with bail bonds and quick shakedowns. But when a pretty young woman like Daisy Harker comes into his office with a crazy request to "find her lost day" he is intrigued. He is too decent to take advantage of a crazy woman, but Mr. Harker is a wealthy man and who is Pinata to turn down money?

What unfolds is a masterpiece of suspense and one of the books that forever changed the domestic thriller. Millar's razor sharp prose cuts a masterful plot and slashes at the racism, sexism, and entitlement endemic to an era otherwise celebrated for its prosperity.

Margaret Millar: A Stranger in My Grave. Soho Press, ISBN: 9781681990156 (February, 2016), eBook, 0.86 MB (ca. 384 p.), $4.99.

Margaret Millar: A Stranger in My Grave (USA 1990)

From the Publisher:
THE TIMES OF TERROR BEGAN, not in the middle of the night when the quiet and the darkness made terror seem a natural thing, but on a bright and noisy morning during the first week in February.

"Margaret Millar, that grand old hand at combining detectival and novelistic concerns does it once more in A STRANGER IN MY GRAVE. Her premise is a striking one: If you dream of your own tombstone, complete with a date in the past, something must have happened on that date -- some event which your conscious mind has forgotten, and which your unconscious remembers as death. Problem: to reconstruct in detail a seemingly meaningless day four years ago. The quest leads to death itself, both in the past and in the present, in a tense and complex novel." -- Anthony Boucher, The New York Times Book Review, November 6, 1960

Margaret Millar: A Stranger in My Grave. International Polygonics, ISBN: 1558820663 (July, 1990), Library of Crime Classics, 310 p., $7.95.

Margaret Millar: A Stranger in My Grave (UK 1976)

From the Publisher:
'We were walking along the beach below the cemetery, Prince and I, and suddenly Prince disappeared up the cliff. I could hear him howling. I whistled for him but he didn't come. I went up the path after him. He was sitting beside a tombstone. It had my name on it: Daisy Fielding Harker. Born November 13, 1930. Killed December 2, 1955...'

"Miss Millar engulfs the reader in a chilling sense of the uncanny" - Daily Telegraph

Margaret Millar: A Stranger in My Grave. The name on the grave was hers… but whose was the body? Penguin, ISBN: 0140039422 (Juyl, 1976), 224 p., 60p.

Margaret Millar: A Stranger in My Grave (UK 1962)

From the Publisher:
She dreamed she had died four years ago. Then, in a lonely cemetery, Daisy discovered that the grave was really there... and her struggle to keep a nightmare from becoming reality began...

A STRANGER IN MY GRAVE
The times of terror began, not in the middle of the night when the quiet and the darkness made terror seem a natural thing, but on a bright and noisy morning during the first week of February.

She sat, gazing out of the window, listening to her husband Jim and the other morning sounds. Then, without warning, without apparent reason, the terror seized her.

What started it? A sound... a random thought... ?
What was it that brought death to the mind of Daisy Fielding Harker?

Margaret Millar is at the height of her powers in this novel, which explores the frightening border country between insanity and crime.

Margaret Millar: A Stranger in My Grave. A Distinguished Novel Of Mystery And Death. London: Corgi, 1962, 255 p., 3'6.