Cast, in Order of Disappearance

Text for Author Bio: Simon Brett is a former radio and television comedy producer, who has been writing full-time for more than twenty years. Creator of the Charles Parks, Mrs. Pargeter and Feathering series of mysteries, his psychological thriller, A Shock to the System was filmed, starring Michael Caine. Married, with three children, he lives in an Agatha Christie-style village in West Sussex, England. Text for Book Description: Who killed Marius Steen, the theatrical tycoon with a fortune to leave his young mistress Jacqui? And who killed Bill Sweet, the shady blackmailer with a supply of compromising photographs? Charles Paris, a middle-aged actor who keeps going on booze and women, takes to detection, by assuming a variety of roles, among them that of a Scotland Yard Detective-Sergeant, and the results are both comic and dramatic. As the mythical McWhirter of the Yard, he actually precipitates the crime; as one of the blackmailers victims, he finds himself in bed with the blackmailers wife; as a small-part player in a horror film (The Zombie Walks), he gets shot at by a murderer. And he arrives at the solution by way of the petrol crisis and an abortive attack of the German measles. Its a light-hearted frolic that is, at the same time, a beautifully ingenious puzzle, and it fizzes with fun and wit.