While Murder Waits

"Well, well, it's very mystifying. But then, murders ought to be like that, oughtn't they?" 


 The reefs, lonely, vast, and menacing, made a thunderous sound as the surf rose and fell ― a cry that mounted “ shriek upon shriek, as of some tortured devil, lifting and quavering and dying away.”  “That's them,” residents of Clearport would say.  “Hear 'em?  The Five Sisters.”


 Retired sea captain George M. Gleasing named his three daughters after the reefs and then  proceeded to raise them as he had ruled his crew, as a tyrant and a bully.  His ruthlessness roused so much hatred that, now, old and ill, but still brutal and unrepentant, “he  was paying for it in all the flames of a diseased imagination.”  Sequestered in a lighthouse, he lived in fear that one of his daughters would breach the old stone walls―and take his life.  


 When heads begin to roll, Dr. Miles Le Breton of the Department of Justice arrives to investigate and finds himself both curious and repelled as much by the ruthless old captain as by his three daughters who mirror the sea that flows through their blood ―no pity, no love, no truth; only cunning, strength, power, and, yes, beauty.


 The story rises to a fitting climax, so terrifying and alarming, that Shudders and chills in a hair-raising story of death in a lighthouse become true. All true.


Mystery buffs who love the old whodunits will love this one.