Tenant for Death

When two young estate agent's clerks arrive at a respectable South Kensington house to check its inventory, they discover something that was never listed—a corpse.
The tenant, Colin James, has mysteriously disappeared, and what initially appears to be a straightforward murder soon reveals a complicated web of secrets, financial troubles, deception, and conflicting motives. Called in to investigate, Scotland Yard's Inspector Mallett must unravel the evidence and determine who had both the opportunity and the reason to commit the crime.
Tenant for Death is Cyril Hare's debut crime novel and the first Inspector Mallett mystery, offering a classic British detective story set against the shadowy world of London's high finance.