Book description
Seduced by the spring sunshine, PI Phyllida Moon takes an
uncharacteristic risk and goes out shopping in Seaminster - for once
with no disguise. Just as she hands over a repair to the owner of the
local jewellers, two armed robbers enter the shop and in the ensuing
panic the owner is shot dead, the assistant flees without trace, and
Phyllida's personal information and address, written on a pad by the
jewellery before the burglary, is taken. Shocked - and paranoid that her
real identity has been uncovered - Phyllida takes refuge in the Golden
Lion hotel. DCS Kendrick begins to suspect that the robbery was a
cover-up for the owner's murder. So, he employs the services of the
Peter Piper Detective Agency - in particular PI Phyllida Moon - in order
to infiltrate and befriend the mourning family and try to get a better
idea of why the jewellery was murdered. 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.
