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THE SPLIT SECOND by M.R.D. Meek

THE SPLIT SECOND

By

Pub Date: Feb. 1st, 1987
Publisher: Scribners

In a last job for his detective-agency employer (Hang the Consequences), the quiet, clever, just-reinstated lawyer Lennox Kemp travels to Scotland to seek Fiona Davison-Maclean, a middle-aged spinster newly rich and long unheard from. Fiona's cousin Lindsay, well-off perennial student living with quixotic mistress Alexina, is also on the trail. But Fiona, it appears, has just married traveling salesman Fergus O'Connell, bought a remote-island house--and is dead of accidental drowning before Kemp and Lindsay reach her. Lindsay's obsession that O'Connell has killed his wife, despite an iron-clad alibi, will bring Kemp back to the island. This time he'll get to the heart of things in a bizarre windup that's intriguing if not totally convincing. Not quite up to the level of Kemp's first adventure but, still, a solidly entertaining story that effectively evokes the look, climate and speech of Scotland.