After a close encounter with a bomb, Detective Superintendent Andy Dalziel recuperates at the Avalon Clinic in the quaint seaside resort of Sandytown. But soon he begins to suspect that those outside the convalescent home have just as many problems as the residents.There's a psychiatrist with more to hide than his patients, a pair of powerful landowners with very different plans for putting the resort on the map, a Chinese acupuncturist with a Yorkshire accent, a skinny-dipping baronet and his ice-box sister, and a man from Dalziel's past who ought to be dead.When someone actually does turn up dead, and under the most macabre circumstances, Chief Inspector Peter Pascoe is called onto the scene. Together again, Dalziel and Pascoe investigate a baffling and complex case as further corpses make it increasingly hard for Sandytown to justify its claim to be 'Home of the Healthy Holiday.' But it's certainly been put on the map... .
Reginald Charles Hill was an English crime writer, and the winner in 1995 of the Crime Writers' Association Cartier Diamond Dagger for Lifetime Achievement. Hill is best known for his more than 20 novels featuring the Yorkshire detectives Andrew Dalziel, Peter Pascoe and Edgar Wield. The characters were used by the BBC in the Dalziel and Pascoe series. - Wikipedia