Caroline Fawley thinks she has the perfect set-up: a manor house, her children around her, and a great lover who only drops in on weekends and is underwriting the whole shebang. After two bad marriages, she doesn't want to marry again and is happy to give up her relatively successful career as an actor (now that she's middle-aged and she's past the lead roles and still a bit young for "character" parts) to be a full-time mistress. The people in the town are torn between the plus of having a celebrity living in their town and the disgust with her private life. It's only a matter of time before this relationship falls apart as well - when her benefactor, supermarket tycoon Marius Fleetwood (né Bert Winterbottom), meets a violent end. Barnard turns our opinions of characters around through the course of the book, sometimes in subtle ways and sometimes coming off the better.Three policemen track down the daring killer: Oddie, Charlie, and PC Rani (whose personal story evolves in another book) of Leeds - sometimes working together, but occasionally withholding information. Low marks probably reflect my getting a bit tired of Barnard. I plan on moving on to a book he's written under another name.
