"The Case of The Unsuitable Suitor"

Born, raised and educated in Wales, Cathy Ace enjoyed a successful career in marketing and training across Europe for twenty years before migrating to Vancouver, Canada.

She applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, The Case of The Unsuitable Suitor, and reported the following:

From page 69:

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Christine’s heart was pounding; Ballinclare Manor wasn’t built on the same scale as Chellingworth Hall’s 268 rooms, but it did have about forty different spaces ranged over four, beautifully proportioned Georgian floors, and she and Alexander had spent the last hour making a concerted effort to enter each one to establish if Brid and Callum Ahearne were anywhere to be found. They weren’t.

‘Basement and outbuildings next,’ said Christine descending from the dusty, near-derelict topmost floor where the tiny servants’ quarters had now become storage rooms for the sort of detritus the landed gentry can accumulate over almost three hundred years.

Alexander sneezed as he followed her. ‘I just need to wash up a bit after that last room. I’m beginning to think you come from a long line of hoarders, and that’s why your flat in Battersea is so overrun with all sorts of decorative bits and pieces.’

‘So says the man who bought an entire antiques business just because he likes old, beautiful things.’

‘I like young, beautiful things too,’ said Alexander, snatching Christine’s waist as the couple rounded the final landing before the last sweep of the staircase to the ground floor.

Playfully pushing him away, Christine stopped abruptly and shushed him. ‘Listen. I think I heard something.’

The couple strained their ears.

‘Yes, I heard that too,’ said Alexander, his eyes alight. ‘I think it came from one of the rooms back here.’

The Case of the Unsuitable Suitor finds Mavis MacDonald and Carol Hill, of the WISE Enquiries Agency, trying to unravel the facts behind the deaths of the three former wives of Anwen-by-Wye’s prodigal, Huw Hughes, who has semi-retired, and now making overtures to their colleague Annie Parker. Is she in danger…or is the fact Huw has been made a widower three times over simply a triple-tragedy? They are also forced to consider that someone they know – living at stately Chellingworth Hall – has just committed a horrid act of vandalism. At the same time, their fourth staff member – Christine Wilson-Smythe – is holidaying at her family’s estate in Ireland, where she and her dangerously attractive beau Alexander Bright face a mystery of their own – what’s happened to the couple who look after the estate when Christine and her viscount father are absent? They seem to have disappeared.

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--Marshal Zeringue