Death by Thunder
A Murder in the Mountains
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
After several years on the West Coast, photographer Janet Upton is home, relieved to be newly unmarried and with her family in the mountains of her Hudson River hometown.
In spite of a vicious thunder storm---and also because of it---Janet and her camera are on a mountainside trying for dramatic photographs when she hears a cry and sees a body flying down from the rocks above her. She hurries to the bottom to find citizens and emergency personnel with the body of Broderick Hale (Janet's uncle by marriage).
Phillips Landing is a town where everyone knows everything about everyone else
---almost. Broderick Hale was a man who spoke his mind, had strong opinions, and lots of money. No one seems to see the event as anything but an unfortunate accident, just as no one did eight years earlier when a wealthy woman building her "dream" home fell from that same mountain. When Janet's film from this stormy day is destroyed, however, she has to wonder, Did Broderick fall, or was he pushed?
In this stand-alone tale of intrigue, Gretchen Sprague has captured the dangerous beauty of her beloved Hudson Highlands. Death by Thunder boasts the strong characters and solid stories that have characterized all her Martha Patterson mysteries.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In the first of what was to be a new cozy series from Sprague (Maquette for Murder), who died shortly after completing the book, Janet Upton, a recent divorc e who has returned to her upstate New York hometown to run an art gallery, is shocked by the death of her uncle Bud, in part because she witnesses his fatal fall from a rocky crag. She's even more surprised to discover that her late, abrasive uncle willed to her a plot of land subject to a sales agreement from which she stands to benefit richly. Uncle Bud's "accidental" death echoes that of another landowner eight years earlier, a woman whose death prompted an investigation of Janet's more beloved uncle Paul. Janet is gradually pulled into a mystery that centers on the property she's inherited, for which she feels a responsibility as its steward. Her ecologically principled curiosity places her in ever-growing danger, while the determined killer, perhaps an obvious suspect to the reader, eludes her amateur sleuthing until the moment of confrontation. An unlikely murder scheme (collapsing a bridge to kill someone?) lends interest to a predictable plot.
