THE ALIBI GUEST: A novel

She was hired to be an old friend. Now her testimony looks like a paid lie.Nora Bell knows how to make herself useful at a stranger's table. The right dress. A convincing laugh. A discreet answer when someone asks how she knows the host. For five thousand pounds, one private dinner at Harrowmere should be her easiest job in months.All she has to do is keep Julian Vale's wife company.Then Julian is found dead.Nora tells the police what she saw. But her booking instructions suddenly contain a sentence she has never read before: the precise account she has just given them. Someone has made the truth look rehearsed-and Nora's past makes her an ideal person to discredit.As a polished evening comes apart, Nora finds that the guests' stories fit together a little too neatly. A daughter knows how a room can deceive an audience. A surveyor has signed something he should not have. A photograph preserves what the witnesses missed.To clear her name, Nora must find out who arranged more than the seating plan and why someone went to such trouble to make sure she was there.The Alibi Guest is a standalone novel of psychological suspense, sharp social observation and a mystery that turns on the difference between what people saw and what they were told to remember.