Book description
When PI Phyllida Moon returns to Seaminster after a trip to Scotland
which changed her personal life for ever, the Peter Piper Detective
Agency has a nice little job ready and waiting for her. Hugh Jordan is
suspicious about just how many late night meetings his wife, Sandra, is
having with her business partner - while Sandra is worried about whether
there is more to Hugh's many choir rehearsals than meets the eye.
Phyllida employs her wide variety of disguises to investigate the
Jordan's world: the spinsterish Miss Spence joins the choir, and the
amicable American, Merle Parker, befriends Sandra. These masks may
succeed in being impenetrable - but the Jordan family, it turns out, is
every bit as enigmatic. 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.
