Skull beneath the skin
The book's similarities to a classic Agatha Christie novel are so frequent that it serves as a running joke throughout the story. She learns that Ivo and Clarissa had an affair whilst Clarissa was still married to Simon's father, who committed suicide by drowning himself shortly after discovering this.
Ambrose denies her story and tells the police that she must have forgotten to prop the trapdoor correctly, causing it to fall.
Realizing this was a motive to murder Clarissa and prevent her from speaking about this, Cordelia heads back to Courcy to confront Ambrose, catching a ride on a fishing boat as Ambrose had not sent the island's boat to pick her up.
A former soldier, he has a 'dark' history on Courcy Island. Download cover A Cordelia Gray Mystery.
The skull beneath the skin characters
Finally he tells her about Tolly, Clarissa's longtime dresser and assistant, whose daughter was dying in the hospital during a run of a play in which Clarissa was starring. Clarissa Lisle hopes to make a spectacular comeback in a production of The Duchess of Malfi, to be played in Ambrose Gorringe's sinister castle at Courcy Island. He employs Cordelia as a sop to his wife's insecurities, never suspecting that she has any serious enemies. Aboard she meets two of her fellow guests, Simon Lessing , Clarissa's teenage stepson, and her cousin Roma. Hoarder, he did not murder her; Simon, summoned to her bedroom for sexual favors was so repulsed by her demands that he had struck and accidentally killed her. Cordelia decides to visit the local newspaper in Speymouth to find out why the review was so important to her as her gut feeling tells her the cutting holds the key to the murder. The following day the guests take a trip to the church crypt with their host, where they discover row upon row of skulls, and where they visit the Devil's Kettle, an underground passageway with a direct opening to the ocean, which was used by smugglers through generations.Trapped within the walls of the Gothic castle, the treacherous past of the island re-emerges, and everyone seems to have a motive for sending Clarissa 'down, down to hell'.
They also find it hard to take Cordelia seriously as a detective and briefly consider that she and Sir George concocted the entire story of the notes together before murdering Clarissa. The newspaper staff are helpful and show her the archive but the review Corxwlia is seeking has already been cut out carefully and removed.
From her walk with Ivo Cordelia realizes there are many people with a motive to scare or threaten Clarissa. Here she brings her back, but makes her act like a bewildered maiden, though she heads a London detective agency.
I regard the butler as a gratuitous insult on the part of fate. That being said, modern life doesn't intrude on the story too often the characters' dialogue, possibly because they're all posh and British, sounds almost exactly the way 's dialogue sounds, and they still do things like dress for dinner and sit around drinking claret served by a butler so if you want to pretend that the book is taking place innothing is really stopping you aside from the rare reference to an event that took place in or something.
In she was elected President of the Society of Authors.