The first of a series of mystery novels by Marina Oliver, in which flamboyant Dodie Fanshaw becomes a detective. Wealthy, middle aged and four-times married Dodie Fanshaw is in Madeira to help make a film about her early life as a chorus girl and Hollywood starlet, and her husbands. She is not amused when her son Jake, indifferent actor, appeals to her for money. Instead of going back to England he remains in Madeira, and contrives to alienate Dodie's friends, a rival actor, the Madeiran family who run the hotel where he had been staying, and a wealthy elderly woman who is besotted by him. The situation becomes intolerable when Jake, drunk, abusive, and insulting everyone, comes uninvited to a party on a yacht on New Year's Eve, arranged to watch the annual Funchal firework spectacle. Marina has written over 70 novels, historical, contemporary, and Regency, as well as suspense and crime.