Death of a Stranger

Even before Tim Le Page and his new wife, Anna, can leave for their honeymoon, he is called back to investigate an attempted murder. But this is no ordinary case, the victim is Tim’s mother.

Drifting from one lover to another, Lorna has never been the maternal type and, as a result, she has made more than her fair share of enemies.

In particular, Tim can’t help feeling that Simon, the latest escort to materialise at Lorna’s side, is too young even for his glamorous mother. But if Simon isn’t interested in Lorna, then what is he doing in Guernsey?

With professional detachment hampered by family loyalty, Le Page knows he must solve this case, and soon – his mother’s life may depend on it.

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.