Almost Murder
By Roderic Jeffries
An explosion at sea off the island of Mallorca…
Inspector Alvarez, the suave, easygoing, cognac-swilling investigator, must solve the murder of a British tourist on the sleepy Spanish island – this time with surprising consequences.
Alvarez is unwilling to agree that the death of a member of the British parliament, in the explosion that also took the life of another man, merits an investigation of unusual importance. In his opinion, a dead MP is less trouble than a live one.
But investigate he must, and things are complicated further still when Alvarez finds himself serving under Comisario Suau, a stickler for discipline and routine, who is convinced that terrorists are responsible for the crime.
Suau soon makes his contempt for Alvarez’s rambling methods of work clear, including his seemingly stupid insistence on investigating not just the deaths of those who’d been aboard the boat, but also their lives.
Unfortunately for both of them, Alvarez’s research unearths some facts that prove sticky for all concerned, though none more so than Alvarez himself.
Roderic Jeffries was born in London in 1926 and went to sea in 1943. Six years later he left that trade to become a lawyer. He again changed profession to become a writer. Since 1951, he has written over one hundred and sixty novels under his own name and several other pseudonyms. He began his career by writing books featuring his father’s character, Blackshirt, a popular detective whose adventures have appeared in print for many decades. In time Jeffries branched out and began to write a variety of mystery novels under his own name and several pen names, including Peter Alding and Jeffrey Ashford.
