It's simple really. After years of hunting ghosts for a living, Jay Richards is pretty damn tired of the whole business. His life is full of jokers and hoaxers, swindlers and sceptics - and that's just his clients. If only Jay could think of something else to do with his life, he would do it- Things soon get more complicated for Jay when he's hired by heiress Zelda Smiling to investigate a possible haunting at Cranmere Hall, her family's ancestral seat and home to her glamorous twin sister Helena. For a start, Helena broke Jay's heart years before, a fact that inevitably brings about its own complications. Worse, Helena seems to have left her husband and run off with a lover- although this doesn't stop Jay from thinking that she's been murdered. Is our hapless hero just bitter and paranoid? Or are his suspicions reasonable? And is any of this connected with the spectral figure that really does seem to be stalking the corridors of the old country house each night in Helena's absence? Set variously in San Francisco, Ibiza and England, The Smiling Affair is at once a gripping supernatural thriller, a sharp satire on the lives of England's rich and idle, an atmospheric murder-mystery and a bewitching love story. Praise for The Comfort Zone: 'Like Douglas Coupland, Sheldon has found a voice that documents the effects of cultural excess- Intelligent, funny and surprisingly moving' Big Issue'Refreshingly accessible-Sheldon keeps the sense of his characters' troubled sterility sharply in focus, while he details the manic drive of their preoccupations' TLS'Wry, idiosyncratic snapshots of modern man's bemusement at life, relationships and, ultimately, himself' Esquire
