Simon Brett's oldest and most beloved character, Charles Paris, is back. Paris, the often out-of-work actor, has a good part, for a change, playing Sir Toby Belch in a summer festival production of Twelfth Night. But when the director takes ill and then Paris' friend in the production is the apparent victim of intentional food poisoning meant for Paris, it's not long until the bodies start to turn up. Paris is forced to deal not only with a wild young director whose idea of Shakespeare the bard himself would hate, but with a murderer in the production as well.
Simon Brett is the creator of six series of detective novels, as well as ten stand-alone novels. His stand-alone novel A Shock to the System was adapted as a film starring Michael Caine. He has been awarded the CWA’s prestigious Diamond Dagger for an outstanding body of work and the Malice Domestic Award for lifetime achievement. He was awarded an OBE in the 2016 New Year’s Honours for Services to Literature and also was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He is a former president of Britain’s Crime Writers Association. He worked as a producer in radio and television before taking up writing full-time.
Geoffrey Howard (a.k.a. Ralph Cosham) (1936–2014) was a British journalist who changed careers to become a narrator and screen and stage actor. He performed in more than one hundred professional theatrical roles. His audiobook narrations were named “Audio Best of the Year” by Publishers Weekly, and he won seven AudioFile Earphones Awards, and in 2013 he won the coveted Audie Award for Best Mystery Narration for his reading of Louise Penny’s The Beautiful Mystery.