The Alpine Advocate
An Emma Lord Mystery
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- $5.99
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
The debut of the Emma Lord murder mystery series.
After a year as publisher-editor of the Alpine Advocate, Emma Lord feels fine about her move to this small town in the foothills of Washington's Cascade Mountains. What she really needs for her paper, though, is a big story. And she gets it--when handsome Mark Doukas, grandson of rich, old Neeny Doukas is murdered. Emma discovers that trying to get straight answers out of Neeny and his thin-lipped son is like poking a nest of sleeping rattlesnakes. What begins with an innocent story about the murdered man, ends with Emma conducting the most interesting, and probably the last, interview of her career from the wrong end of a .38....
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Daheim's ( Holy Terrors ) amateur-sleuth whodunits unfortunately recycle well-worn elements: mistaken identities, long-hidden secrets, convoluted familial relationships and heavy-handed clues. Even a new heroine, newspaper publisher Emma Lord, and a change in locale, here the mythical small town of Alpine, Wash., can't rescue this ho-hum mystery. Chris Martinez, black sheep of the rich and powerful Doukas clan, has returned to Alpine for the first time since he was a boy. Soon his cousin Mark Doukas is bludgeoned to death, with the alienated Chris the leading suspect. Then Emma's deliveryman, Gibb Frazier, is murdered, followed shortly by the discovery of a skeleton in an abandoned mine shaft--which proves to be the remains of Chris's long-lost father. Emma, ably assisted by town historian/gossip Vida Runkel, must unravel the tangled relationships that link virtually every inhabitant of Alpine in order to solve the murders. Despite the complex game of ``who-married-whom-and-who-had-whose-child,'' readers will have no trouble spotting clues, as Daheim appears to do everything in her power to call attention to them short of printing them in capital letters.
