When Cora is savagely murdered with a hatchet, the extraordinary remark she made the previous day at her brother Richard's funeral suddenly takes on a chilling significance. At the reading of Richard's will, Cora was clearly heard to say: 'It's been hushed up very nicely, hasn't it. But he was murdered, wasn't he?' In desperation, the family solicitor turns to Hercule Poirot to unravel the mystery.
Judith Spaeth was born in May 10, 1944 in San Luis Obispo, California, USA, and grew up all over the country, the oldest of three children of an appliance-store franchiser and a housewife. Before majored in Business at Northwestern University, Judy married with a dentist from St. Louis, Missouri, and they had two children, a daugther, Whitney (b. 1967), and a son, Clay (1969). But the marriage didn't work out, and at 25, she became a divorced mother to two.
She worked as comptroller of a major trucking company and was the first female executive producer at a CBS radio station. In 1974, while working as an assistant director on a TV-commercial film crew in St. Louis, she met an advertising director at General Motors, Michael McNaught, a divorced father of five. The pair married later that year and moved with her children to a Detroit suburb. Judy devoted herself to homemaking and slowly went little crazy. She started to read in her spare time, and she bought by accident her first romance: "The Flame and the Flower" by Kathleen E. Woodiwiss, and she loved it. With her husband encouragement, who buying her a new typewriter, she decided to try writing a novel herself in 1978. She wrote her first manuscript, "Whitney, My Love", a historical novel with the names of her childrens as protagonist, but she cannot found a publisher. She decided wrotre a contemporary romance, "Tender Triumph" and she sold in January 1982, the next month her sister Debbie died of an allergic reaction to medication. In June 19, 1983, her husband Mike, a hunter, was killed in an acciden while cleaning his guns, he died in her arms. The next day, the cover art for "Tender Triumph" came in the mail, but she had lost the interesting in write.
She and her children moved to Dallas, Texas, close to friends. Her books "Double Standards" and "Whitney, My Love" had been published, and after two years lost to mourning, she began writing again. She remarried a third time with Don Smith, a engineer and professional golfer, and moved to Friendswood, but the marriage ended friendly after three years in May 1993.
Judy lives in a white-columned waterfront mansion near Galveston, Texas. Her children have grown up, her daugther was now a teacher, and her son an accounts manager.
