Lady Dinnister of Marlby Manor may be elderly, but there's lot of life in her yet... Her heirs try to convince her to sell her vast estate and give them their inheritance early, to save on taxes of course. But Lady Dinnister can't bear to give up her home and turns them down flat. That's when the "accidents" start... When a barbed bouquet of red roses pierces her palm, she attributes this to poor presentation on the florist's part. When the front wheel falls off her Rolls-Royce, she believes it to be a mechanical mishap. But when her hairdryer turned into a lethal weapon, Lady Dinnister finally decides someone is trying to kill her... Only she wasn't the one who ended up dead. Was it the buxom cook who moonlighted as a nude model? The dashing chauffeur who was driven by ambition? The spoilt grandchildren? Detective Ben Spence, assisted by his able partner, Inspector Laurel, thinks it is much more likely to be one of the greedy relatives. Someone has carried out an ingenious crime. But if the killer is so clever, why is the wrong victim mouldering in their grave? Spence at Marlby Manor is a suspenseful murder mystery that casts suspicion on everyone and everything. Michael Allen was born in Peterborough in 1939 and was educated at Oundle and Queens' College, Cambridge. Between leaving school and going to Cambridge, he worked for six months on the staff of the New York Herald Tribune in New York. He now works as an Area Administrator at the University of Bath, and lives with his wife and two children at Bradford-on-Avon in Wiltshire.