Book description
Bob and Barbara, Jack and Caroline. Two happily married couples who
have been great friends for so long. But all is not what it seems. For
Barbara does not know that when Bob stays overnight with Jack and
Caroline, Jack is never there. But, one night, arriving early for his
usual intimate dinner with Caroline, Bob find murder instead of passion
at his friends' house. Desperately he tries to get hold of Jack to make
it look as if his presence there is as innocent as it is supposed to be.
Detective Chief Inspector Hewitt is sure that both Jack and Bob are
concealing information from him. But it takes a second murder attempt
and an anonymous letter before he is able to discover the terrible
truth. 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.
