High Heels — Miles Tripp

This story is set in Marseille, a colourful city rich in vivid contrasts. Karen Ormerod has come here with her husband in search of material for one of her travel books. She finds the atmosphere exciting but he doesn't care much for the place and likes it even less when Duprise, a young, self-confessed pimp, tries to ingratiate himself with Karen.

A police informer who has over-heard Karen chatting with the young man, and knows him to be a university drop-out and something of a confidence trickster, believes that Duprise is simply after her money.

And then Karen is violently removed from the scene. her husband enlists the help of Sampson, a private detective, to find out who is responsible. Samson's inquiries reveal that Duprise is dangerously involved in the gang land underworld of Marseille and that an unknown shoe-fetishist may hold the clue as to what has happened to Karen. These discoveries provide no relief for the husband and no immediate solution.

The author springs one or two stunning surprises as the story unfolds and brings it, with his customary skill and style, to a strange but completely plausible and satisfying denouement.