Book description
Actress Helen Johnson, recently married to an officer in British
Intelligence with whom she once worked, feels she lacks the nerve to
join him in a further life-and-death assignment such as that she
undertook in
Whoever I Am
, described by The Times
as 'in the Christie thriller manner'. Nevertheless, she still wants to
exercise her unusual talents. It is after light-heartedly offering 'a
unique service' through the advertisement columns of some magazines that
she finds herself playing three such diverse parts as the bridegroom's
only relative at a suburban wedding, the girlfriend paraded for the
approval of Mama, and the wife of a would-be business executive who must
be assessed along with her husband - not on the stage but in real life.
She also finds herself innocently in trouble on a scale to send her back
after all, and without choice, into another role where not only is her
life at stake but her husband's life also and the safety of their home.
In the psychiatric clinic where Helen must anonymously go both to hide
and to seek, can it really be that someone is trying to poison her? Can
an internationally sinister development really be taking place alongside
the innocent life of the hospital? This is horror enough, but it is when
a very special patient is admitted that Helen's ordeal turns to
nightmare and she is force to use her talents, her courage and a
desperate ruthlessness in an effort to protect all she holds dear. As in
her earlier adventure, 'the incidental realities are as terrifying as
the plot' (Listener
). 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.
