The Candlelight Room

Alice Alcott came to Derbyshire to look at a painting. By supper she had been cast in it.

Every October the Fairleighs of Wyncote Hall stage a living picture of their Joseph Wright, The Lantern. Six people take their places in total darkness, the curtain goes back, and for three minutes the whole village sits perfectly still by candlelight. This year the old showman in the chair is Hugo Fairleigh: charming, in debt, and about to sell the house to a hotel. This year, when the candles are lit again, he doesn't get up.

By midnight the river is over the bridge and the police are only a voice on the telephone. Everyone who stood beside Hugo in the dark has something to hide. His second wife. His sister, with an alibi she can't use. A young man from an auction house with an eye on the painting. And the quiet picture expert from London, who was standing closest of all.

Nobody expects much of Alice. She is polite, easy to forget, and she looks at paintings for a living. But she knows that in every good picture there is one face that isn't looking where it's told.

A classic country-house mystery with a flood, a snoring pug and a secret thirty years old. The Candlelight Room is the fourth Alice Alcott Mystery and can be read on its own.