The morning after Detective Superintendent Duncan Kincaid arrives at Followdale House in northern England, he finds assistant manager Sebastian Wade's electrocuted corpse in the time-share's pool. Suicide, insists dim, boorish local Chief Inspector Nash, but Duncan interrupts his holiday to investigate his fellow guests: political hopeful Patrick Rennie and his well-connected wife Marta; endearing spinster sisters Penelope and Emma MacKenzie; ex-army twit Edward Lyle and his long-suffering wife Janet; and attractive scientist Hannah Alcock, who has her own hidden agenda at Followdale. There'll be more murderous attacks, some neat mystification, and a modestly effective solution, though Anglophilic first-novelist Crombie, a Texan, piles on the Yorkshire charm a little thick. Quietly competent, in the manner of the early Martha Grimes.
