Scandal in Fair Haven
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- ¥1,000
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“Cheers for Henrie O, an intelligent, engaging sleuth!”—Mary Higgins Clark
Henrie O is looking forward to a quiet holiday. Instead, the ex-journalist turned sleuth awakens in a Tennessee mountain cabin to discover her friend’s nephew, his shirt stained with blood, his handsome face stricken by fear and horror.
Craig Matthews swears he didn’t kill his wife, swears he didn’t lure Patty Kay out to the playhouse of their lavish Fair Haven estate and leave her bloodied and dead. Why, then did he run away? It’s a question that draws Henrie O into the thick of a life-and-death drama, into the lives of Fair Haven’s best families, and into a world where wealth and privilege mask a hotbed of sex, lies, and desperation.
Only when Henrie O begins to question the motives of the bereaved widower, the sullen nymphet of a daughter, the irresistible ex-husband, the venomous sister, even the ingratiating schoolmaster of the exclusive school where Patty Kay was a trustee, does the truth start to emerge. But when another corpse turns up, Henrie O knows time is running out. Now she must untangle this deadly web—or become the next victim of a mind bent on murder.
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Agatha Award-winning Hart takes her retired Missouri newspaperwoman, Henrietta O'Dwyer Collins, introduced in Dead Man's Island, to Tennessee, where she becomes the honorary aunt of a young man accused of killing his wife. Henrie O is vacationing at the mountain cabin of her friend Margaret, who is recovering from heart surgery, when Margaret's nephew, Craig Matthews, arrives distraught and bloodied. As he tells of having found his kitchen demolished and his wife Patty Kay murdered, Henrie O realizes that the weak-willed, perhaps devious, Craig has set himself up as the killer by running from the scene. As a favor to Margaret, she decides to investigate. In ritzy Fair Haven, near Nashville, Henrie discovers that the murdered woman had been a vibrant, forceful figure in town, a teacher and trustee at a posh private school (where a teenage girl recently committed suicide) and the owner of a bookstore where her friends worked as a sideline to their social pursuits. Gradually connecting the student's suicide to Patty Kay's death, Henrie also learns that each of the woman's friends has a motive for murder. From the first pages to the climax, where she uses a cannister of Mace to save herself from a murderer, Hart's widowed sleuth is a heroine of admirable courage and wit.
