Book description
After fleeing London and her failed marriage, the Channel Island of
Guernsey had felt like an escape to paradise for vet Anna Weston. With a
new post as junior partner in a St Peter Port veterinary practice, and a
new love in Guernseyman, Detective Inspector Tim Le Page, Anna has never
felt happier or more secure. Until she finds herself on the receiving
end of a series of bizarre and terrifying threats. Anna cannot bear to
believe that any of her new friends or colleagues may be responsible,
and it is almost a relief when suspicion falls on her estranged husband,
who has abandoned his home and business and left no forwarding address.
But who sent Anna's husband an anonymous package of photographs showing
Anna and Tim together? And why would they want to cause trouble for
Anna? She and Tim are set to face further outrage before the final
atrocity - the impact of which will spread throughout the community.
As an only child, Eileen Dewhurst was self-sufficient and bookish from
an early age, preferring solitude or one-to-one contacts to groups, and
hating sport. Her first attempts at writing were not auspicious. At 14,
a would-be family saga was aborted by an uncle discovering it and
quoting from it choked with laughter. A second setback came a few years
later at school, when a purple passage was returned with the words 'Cut
this cackle!' written across it in red ink: a chastening lesson in how
embellishments can weaken rather than strengthen one's message. Eileen
read English at Oxford, and afterwards spent some unmemorable years in
'Admin' before breaking free and dividing her life in two: winters in
London doing temporary jobs to earn money and experience, summers at
home as a freelance journalist, spinning 'think pieces' for the
Liverpool Daily Post and any other publications that would take them,
and reporting on food and fashion for the long defunct Illustrated
Liverpool News, as well as writing a few plays. Her first sustained
piece of writing was a fantasy for children which was never published
but secured an agent. Her Great Autobiographical Novel was never
published either, although damned with faint praise and leading to an
attempt at crime writing that worked: over the next thirty years she
produced almost a book a year and also published some short stories in
anthologies and Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. Eileen has always
written from an ironic stance, never allowing her favourite characters
to take themselves too seriously: a banana skin is ever lurking.
