Lucy Misses Nothing

October 1930. A tidal island off the English coast. A house full of women who have kept one secret for fourteen years.When Lady Beatrice Vale writes to River Heights, she encloses two things. A death certificate that says Eleanor Whitcomb died of a wound to the throat in the morning room at Blackthorn Hall, examined where she lay. And a photograph of that room taken the same afternoon, labeled Nothing moved, with blood on the carpet and nobody on it.Nancy Drew, twenty, a lawyer's daughter with a tidy mind, sails to find out which paper is lying. She has not reached the end of the branch line before an elderly spinster in the opposite seat reads her notes upside down and tells her, kindly, that she has got the doctor's sex wrong. Her name is Jane Marple. She was in the house that day. So were five other women, and Lady Beatrice has gathered them all under one roof to say, at last, what they did.She never gets the chance. On the second night the sea covers the causeway, the telephone wire is cut from inside the house, and a scream sounds from behind the locked morning room door. When the lock is broken, the room is dressed exactly as in the photograph. This time there is a body.Nancy trusts facts. Miss Marple trusts people, and knows what facts can do to them. Between them stands Lucy Bell, seventeen, a housemaid who notices what the grown-ups miss and has never been told why a stranger in the house keeps looking at her.Lucy Misses Nothing brings together two detectives from the golden year of 1930 in a fair-play locked-room mystery with every clue on the page, and a story underneath it about what it costs to be rescued.