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assistant Jeff, only to be mightily disappointed. I need not go into details here, other than to say it involved Dixieland jazz. She was petite, and when leaving never appeared to wear jewellery – at least as far as my binoculars could detect – which I thought said a lot about her. She usually walked at a steady clip, always clutching a paperback book in her hand, yet in passing No Alibis never once thought to stop in or to glance through the open door or to admire the life-size painting of Columbo that dominates the wall behind me. I had once gone a bit mad and given her a little wave as she passed, but she either didn't see it or deliberately ignored me. A shuffling drunk did notice, however, and misinterpreted my friendly gesture as an indication that I wished him to continue on his merry way. He therefore immediately and perhaps understandably entered my shop and spat on a table of books and called me the kind of names that do not feature in the average episode of Murder, She Wrote.
    However, on this occasion I had been studying her shop window for forty-seven minutes, without detecting any signs of movement, and was wondering if after eight months of steady surveillance it was time for me to take the initiative by introducing myself to her under the guise of buying a watch or a bangle for my mother, when the door opened and my next case walked in. I reluctantly turned from my vigil and found myself nodding at a distinguished-looking middle-aged gentleman in a grey pinstripe suit and lavender tie. Without bothering to glance at the shelves of new releases, or the table devoted to titles recommended by the staff – me, in fact, because Jeff's taste is in his bottom – he immediately approached the counter and placed two hands on it as if to steady himself, before asking in a deep yet querulous voice if the new James Patterson was in yet.
    'Sir,' I replied with suitable haughtiness, because I know my onions, 'the old James Patterson isn't in. This is a James Patterson-free zone. Once we begin stocking Pattersons we'll have no room for anything else. We may as well change the name of the shop to Patterson Books.'
    I felt confident in being so flippant because I knew straight away that this man was no more interested in James Patterson than he was in the man in the moon. It was his voice: choked with emotion. And nobody has ever gotten emotional over a James Patterson novel. If I had known then that this man's visit would lead me to become embroiled in my most fiendishly difficult and certainly most dangerous investigation, The Case of the Dancing Jews, then I would have excused myself for several moments, darted out the back way, charged down the alley, raced across the road to the Eason's book store and bought that month's James Patterson, sped back across the road and up the alley, all the while ruthlessly peeling off their 25% off sticker, in at the rear entrance, through the kitchen, into the body of the shop and then sold it to him for full whack, all in order to avoid further involvement in the sordid events I am about to recount.
    However, too late, he started to talk, and before very long he had reeled me in to a mystery that began, as with all of the others, with his employing the services of the private eye next door.

    'Truth be told,' he began, 'I'm not really after a Patterson. But I understand he's very . . . popular. It was just an ice-breaker. You see, I'm a publisher myself.' He nodded at me, clearly under the mistaken impression that this meant that there was already some kind of a bond between us. He nodded at my Ikea shelves. 'Of course not your type of material. Local books. History. Photography. Memoirs. Some literature, a little poetry. We do a very nice calendar of Strangford Lough. We're called Beale Feirste Books.'
    'Yes Belfast Books,' I said.
    'No – a lot of people make that mistake. It's actually Beale Feirste Books.'
    'But it's the same thing.'
    He looked at me. 'No it's not.'
    I knew