Book description
Charles De Garde is a man who doesn't have a care in the world. Partner
in a prestigious Guernsey law firm, highly respected in the local
community, a contented marriage to a wife who happily tolerates his
string of affairs - what more could he ask for? But he makes the mistake
of believing himself to be impervious to danger. A mugger is at loose on
the island, and when Charles one night defies his wife's warnings and
goes for his usual stroll in idyllic Candie Gardens, it turns out to be
his last.
At first it appears that Charles De Garde has been yet another hapless
victim of a criminal who has finally resorted to violence - with fatal
consequences. But Charles's body has not been robbed. And when the
mugger comes forward with an unbreakable alibi, it is left to Detective
Inspector Tim Le Page to face the unwelcome fact that his cousin Charles
may have had an enemy.
A jealous husband, a spurned mistress, and, in particular, Joly Duguy,
son of a wartime collaborator, who bitterly resents De Garde's
persecution of his father - any one of these might have hated Charles
enough to want him dead. But it is not until a second death in Candie
Gardens that Le Page begins to make his way towards the final, terrible
truth. 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.
