Amateur sleuth Mordecai Tremaine is back in another classic mystery from the author ofMurder for Christmas

Mordecai Tremaines hobby of choice crime detection has left him in need of a holiday. A break away from that gruesome business of murder will be just the ticket, and the picturesque island of Moulin dOr seems to be just the destination.

Amid the sunshine and the sea air, Mordecai falls in with a band of fellow holidaymakers and tries to forget that such a thing as foul play exists. He should have been wiser, of course, because before too long villainy rears its head and a dead body is discovered.

With a killer stalking the sand dunes, it falls to Mordecai to piece together the truth about just who has smuggled murder on to the island idyll

Francis Duncan is the pseudonym for William Underhill, who was born in 1918. He lived virtually all his life in Bristol and was a scholarship boy boarder at Queen Elizabeths Hospital school. Due to family circumstances he was unable to go to university and started work in the Housing Department of Bristol City Council. Writing was always important to him and very early on he published articles in newspapers and magazines. His first detective story was published in 1936.

In 1938 he married Sylvia Henly. Although a conscientious objector, he served in the Royal Army Medical Corps in World War II, landing in France shortly after D-Day. After the war he trained as a teacher and spent the rest of his life in education, first as a primary school teacher and then as a lecturer in a college of further education. In the 1950s he studied for an external economics degree from London University. No mean feat with a family to support; his daughter, Kathryn, was born in 1943 and his son, Derek, in 1949.

Throughout much of this time he continued to write detective fiction from sheer inner necessity, but also to supplement a modest income. He enjoyed foreign travel, particularly to France, and took up golf on retirement. He died of a heart attack shortly after celebrating his fiftieth wedding anniversary in 1988.