"I set it down, that one may smile, and smile, and be a villain" Hamlet, Act I, scene v It's simple really. After years of hunting ghosts in California 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, 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 Willoughby, her family's ancestral home and residence of 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 sprawling mansion each night in Helena's absence? Set variously on the streets of San Francisco, Ibiza's shimmering beaches and in the murky swamplands of North Carolina, The Smiling Affair is at once a gripping supernatural thriller, a sharp satire on the lives of the rich and idle, an atmospheric murder-mystery and a bewitching story about lost love.