A Nice Little Business

· Pan Macmillan
Ebook
216
Pages

About this ebook

Who would dream that a chance encounter on a city bus could lead an innocent young woman into a nightmare of mystery, intrigue, and even murder? But that’s exactly what happens when Cathy Carter, the artistic wife of Detective Inspector Neil Carter of Scotland Yard, boards a crowded London bus and takes a seat next to a sweet old woman named Mrs Willoughby.

As the streets breeze by, the two women get to chatting and become fast friends. After Cathy breathlessly reveals the wonderful news of her first pregnancy, Mrs Willoughby, a dressmaker and clairvoyant, offers to make her a maternity wardrobe and read her future. In return, Cathy will paint the woman’s portrait.

It is a friendly and seemingly innocuous arrangement until the day Cathy stops by the dressmaker’s studio for a fitting and finds that someone has made a very permanent, brutal alteration on Mrs Willoughby herself!

Suddenly the young mother-to-be finds herself under suspicion for murder, and her husband, whose temper has just suspended him from the force, begins his own private investigation, and unconventional bit of sleuthing that bring startling – and very deadly – results.

About the author

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.

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