This is in the Phyllida Moon series - there are, I think, three previous books about Phyllida which were published in the mid 1990s. This book is the paperback of a 2003 volume. Phyllida Moon has an unusual career - she has been an actress and has continued her roles off the stage by acting as a private investigator and following and interacting with her subjects in a variety of different roles.
She carries her role- playing to the lengths of using a hotel room to change into the relevant persona so that her own home and personality remain totally uninvolved and untraceable.
This rule is vital to her own feeling of security in working for a Detective Agency. In Naked Witness she feels that her being has been violated when she is the eyewitness to a crime and this leads to someone apparently discovering her identity as Phyllida Moon and being able to threaten her. The only solution for Phyllida is to eschew any return to her own home and personality and to investigate the crime and attempt to recover her anonymity.
She lives and works in an imaginary Southern seaside town called Seaminster
and this is attractively described. Her clever acting in real situations is
carefully explained in its preparation and the investigations she makes are
fascinating. The heroine is beguiling and the plot well twisted to a logical
conclusion
——–
Jennifer Palmer
Eileen Dewhurst has been writing since 1975 and has more than 20 novels to her
credit. She has not written about one character only though, as with Phyllida,
she sometimes writes several books about a particular individual. Previous Moon
books are Now You See Her, The Verdict in Winter and Alias the Enemy.