Book description
Why has John Everard, a gentle-mannered teacher of old-fashioned
outlook surrendered an insurance policy and vanished? Is it really
because, as he has told his wife, he fears a deterioration in his health
and wants to go out 'living it up' in his own way? Have the tensions in
a permissive sixth form college got him down? Did other women in his
life really matter to him? Or has he absconded with one of his pupils,
prim little Susan Shires, who has also disappeared? Why has Sue dumped
her bag and booked a double room at a sleazy London hotel? Kenworthy,
now retired from the Yard, is called in by Mrs Everard and finds himself
exploring a world of some strange values. Meanwhile, reports on missing
persons all over the country are being collated. Are Everard and Sue
indulging in love-hate tantrums up an down the Norfolk coast? Or are
they in the West Country, being turned away by suspicious landladies?
The mystery is not simplified when a girl's body in Sue's clothes is
found in two different places. Kenworthy, working for a change as
unofficial assistant to his former side-kick Shiner Wright, breaks this
one by his familiar mixture of leaping imagination, bizarre deception -
and by his instinct for the motives behind human eccentricities. John
Buxton Hilton was born in 1921 in Buxton, Derbyshire. After his war
service in the army he became an Inspector of schools, before retiring
in 1970 to take up full-time writing. Hilton wrote two books on language
teaching as well as being a prolific crime writer - his works include
the Superintendent Simon Kenworthy series and the Inspector Thomas Brunt
series, as well as the Inspector Mosley series as John Greenwood.
