Murders anonymous

the long version

*You called the police. That was the first thing to do. You did it at once...* Yet Matthew Tierney found himself sitting in a chair, staring at the strangled body of his wife; he was paralyzed by shock, unable to reach for the telephone on a nearby table. Perhaps it was this delay in calling the police that made him a prime suspect (an airtight alibi notwithstanding) or perhaps it was the substantial inheritance that his wife had recently come into--and that was now his. Tierney, however, has a few ideas of his own about who might have wrapped a cord neatly around his wife's throat. His investigation takes him to the lovely seaside resort where she had often vacationed, and where it seems that murder, too, is now on a holiday. For Tierney's prime suspect--his wife's lover--is found dead...and evidence again points a finger directly at Matthew Tierney...