A Shilling for Candles

Published in 1936, this Inspector Alan Grant mystery opens when the film actress Christine Clay is found dead on a Kent beach. The death looks like drowning, but Grant finds signs of violence and a circle of people around her: a titled husband, a songwriter, a fanatical brother, and a young man who had been on the shore and then fled. Grant works between London and the coast, testing alibis against the public story of a star. The novel is a police investigation into how a famous woman's private life and a chance encounter by the water produced a body the tide could not explain.

Bound in green buckram, blocked with a black and white image by the artist. Green endpapers. Black slipcase.