Life is hard, or so Alvarez judged before Maurice Rook set sail from Port Llueso in his luxury motor cruiser and disappeared ? then it becomes very much harder. Noyes, working for an English firm of investigators, arrives on Majorca suspecting Rook did not die from accidental drowning, but has attempted to perpetrate an insurance fraud intended to recoup the money he lost in a proposed development in the south of the Peninsula.
Roderic Jeffries was born in London in 1926 and was educated at Harrow View House Preparatory School and the Department of Navigation, University of Southampton.
In 1943 he joined the New Zealand Shipping Company as an apprentice and sailed to Australia and New Zealand, but later transferred to the the Union Castle Company in order to visit a different part of the world.
He returned to England in 1949 where he was admitted to the Honourable Society of Gray's Inn and read for the Bar at the same time as he began to write. He was called to the Bar in 1953, and after one year's pupilage practiced law for a few terms during which time there to write full time.
His first book, a sea story for juveniles, was published in 1950. His books have been published in many different countries and have been adapted for film, television, and radio.
He lived for a time in the country in a 17th century farmhouse, almost, but not quite overlooking Romney Marsh before he and his wife moved to Mallorca. They have two children.
My fourth or fifth Alvarez mystery, each different though the peripheral characters continue to provoke. An insurance scam, a boat and greed among all the English hiding in Mallorca.