in genre ( )

Tense, elliptical prose with flashes of real warmth and humour enliven Frances Fyfield’s crime novels. She is a very individual writer – concentrating on the darkness of human existence and seeing it from the inside of her characters for the most part. Not for her the dull police-procedural approach to crime! Her character exposition is particularly good and her prose style is evocative, if rambling.
The plot here concerns an independent female lawyer with a penchant for lost causes, a mysterious death in the past which still causes reverberations for the inhabitants of a small seaside town, and a visitor to a remarkable hotel which eventually seems to take on a strange existence of its own. All of this is enjoyably eccentric in a way that has made Frances Fyfield one of my favourite acquired tastes. ( )