I would start with Madam, Will You Talk?—it's her first, and in some ways I think it's the best. Charity Selbourne, who was widowed in World War II, is on vacation in the south of France when she meets a desperately unhappy boy who calls himself David Shelley; as she begins to make friends with him, she becomes drawn into a net of intrigue and murder that started during the war and has not yet finished playing itself out. The plot has an almost Hitchcockian cast, as Charity is pursued for reasons that she doesn't understand, an innocent mistaken for guilty; and then there is David's father, the aptly-named Richard Byron, who stood trial for the murder of his best friend, and wants to know at any cost what Charity can tell him about his son. There are pieces that are still more melodramatic than others, particularly the climax, but it's also grounded beautifully in France of the 1950's (as it would appear to a French-speaking Englishwoman), and the chase scenes practically yell for a film treatment. It's probably my favorite of her books.
The other one I'd start with is This Rough Magic: Lucy Waring is a second-string actress whose latest play has just folded, and who has come to Corfu to stay with her sister and get away from London for a while. Also in residence on Corfu, however, is the famous thespian Julian Gale, who retired from the stage a few years ago under obscure circumstances; nerves, perhaps. He lives now with his son Max in a glorious solitude of roses, and all would be well on Lucy's holiday except that she and Max take an instant, vicious dislike to one another—given all the Shakespearean echoes in the text, I think their Beatrice-and-Benedick flavor is no accident—and, more critically, a local fisherman has turned up dead and a local boy has gone missing. I'm not sure this novel is as much a thriller as Madam, Will You Talk?, but it has got fantastic crackpot Shakespeareana and dialogue that you want to hear out loud, and I maintain that Derek Jacobi as Julian Gale would be brilliant.
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The other one I'd start with is This Rough Magic: Lucy Waring is a second-string actress whose latest play has just folded, and who has come to Corfu to stay with her sister and get away from London for a while. Also in residence on Corfu, however, is the famous thespian Julian Gale, who retired from the stage a few years ago under obscure circumstances; nerves, perhaps. He lives now with his son Max in a glorious solitude of roses, and all would be well on Lucy's holiday except that she and Max take an instant, vicious dislike to one another—given all the Shakespearean echoes in the text, I think their Beatrice-and-Benedick flavor is no accident—and, more critically, a local fisherman has turned up dead and a local boy has gone missing. I'm not sure this novel is as much a thriller as Madam, Will You Talk?, but it has got fantastic crackpot Shakespeareana and dialogue that you want to hear out loud, and I maintain that Derek Jacobi as Julian Gale would be brilliant.