‘A fabulously satisfying addition to the canon of vintage crime’
Daily Express
‘Unashamedly cosy, with gentle humour and a pleasingly eccentric amateur sleuth’
The Guardian
‘Highly amusing’
Evening Standard
‘TP Fielden is a fabulous new voice and his dignified, clever heroine is a compelling new character’
Wendy Holden, Daily Mail
‘A golden age mystery’
Sunday Express
‘Tremendous fun’
The Independent
TP FIELDEN is a biographer, broadcaster and journalist. Resort to Murder is the second in the English Riviera Murders series featuring Miss Dimont.
For Laurel Wilson Voyager, forager
CONTENTS
Pale aquamarine and milky like the waters of Venice, the sea moved slowly inland. The shoreline at Todhempstead welcomed the advance reluctantly, giving up its golden sands inch by inch, unwilling to concede a single yard of the most beautiful beach.
The body lay some way distant from the incoming tide, but sooner or later it would have to be moved.
For the moment, though, it lay there, surrounded by a frozen tableau – a small group of people immobilised by what lay at their feet. Death changes behaviour patterns, imposes a protocol of its own.
She was young, she was blonde, and she may have been pretty but for the hideous open wound that claimed half her face. Her dress was glamorous in an inexpensive sort of way, arranged around her decorously enough. It was still dry, a sure indicator it had not been here too long.
Frank Topham looked down with some discomfort. The long shallow beach had at its furthest end a high embankment, surely too far away for the victim to have fallen from and landed here. The injuries which claimed her life were too severe – that much was evident – for her to have walked or crawled to her final resting place, yet there were no footprints around the body apart from those made sparingly by the small group of eyewitnesses.
Nor was there any blood.
These contradictions jarred Inspector Topham’s usually tranquil state of mind, but were swept aside for the moment as he looked down on the wretched girl.
‘Twenty, I should say,’ he murmured to the two faceless acolytes standing at his shoulder.
‘No shoes,’ said one.
‘No handbag,’ replied Topham.
The other lit a cigarette and looked up at the sky. He didn’t seem terribly interested.
Whatever passed next between these custodians of the peace was drowned by the arrival of the up train from Exbridge, a billowing, grunting triumph of the steam engineer’s art, slowing as it made its long approach into Todhempstead Spa station.
‘Better