Just Deserts

Miriam Spiller was middle-aged, plain, and resident on Mallorca, where to the English colony's surprise, she had just become engaged. Her fiance was an unsuccessful novelist -- so unsuccessful that he risked deportation if he could not put down a lump sum forthwith to satisfy the Spanish authorities. Miriam talked bravely of borrowing the money for him, but instead she went back to her solitary flat and that night drank too much gin, staggered onto the wrought-iron balcony, and crashed through its rusted railing. A clear case of accidental death.

Except that Brenda Stewart, courier with a tour operator and Miriam's nearest approach to a friend, thought otherwise and passed on her suspicions to the police. And the police were represented by Inspector Enrique Alvarez, whose patient investigation into the manners, morals and past histories of those of Mallorca's English residents who knew Miriam led him into a veritable labyrinth of subterfuge.

Alvarez expected to find crime at its heart, but he never expected to uncover a crime which would affect his own life and happiness.