Amateur sleuth Astrid Swift faces a maritime mystery in this cosy crime adventure set on the Isle of Wight.
It's high summer and, with the grisly events at Dorset's Sherborne Hall behind her, Astrid Swift sets sail for the Isle of Wight. She's been asked to value a collection of maritime art owned by a recently deceased millionaire.
His surviving daughter has inherited the art along with the family's seafront mansion, The Needle's Eye, and wants to sell up. There are too many memories of her twin sister, a sailing prodigy who went missing at sea three years earlier.
When Victor Leech, the local busybody, is found washed up under the town pier, Astrid thinks lightning has struck twice. She's stumbled on a fresh case that only she and her new art club friends can solve. But getting to the bottom of the unexplained death will draw out powerful new enemies...
The second in the Astrid Swift murder mystery series pitches our art restorer heroine into the thick of Cowes Week, the most respected sailing regatta in the world. As the deaths stack up, the Isle of Wight's reputation for being England's friendliest island is about to be put to the test. This British sporting summer just turned deadly.
Praise for M. H. Eccleston:
'Intelligent and gently humorous, with a suitably eccentric cast of characters' M S Morris
'A feisty heroine, an ingenious plot and a cast of quirky characters that soon feel like your best friends make The Trust a cozy crime to savour' Merryn Allingham
