Blackground — Joan Aiken

Actress Cat Conwill has landed the lead part in Middlemarch being filmed by Pyramid Television on location at Knoyle Court. The estate's owner Lord James Tybold Fortuneswell appears and is smitten by Cat, who has been transformed into a silver blonde for the part. They are soon honeymooning in Venice, even though they barely know each other. When they begin to exchange notes about their pasts, Cat fails to connect Ty's sudden migraine attack and ensuing coldness toward her with her revelation that she had met him years before when she was a trainee nurse and he was at the bedside of a dying patient.

Blackground turns, almost imperceptibly, from a chatty, albeit sensitive, first-person narrative into a witty murder mystery. Cat's meditations on life and the death of her Welsh-Russian mother gradually are overridden by her growing awareness that several unexplained accidents have threatened her life.