Desert Summer
A Claire Gray Mystery
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
The first year in academia ends with a bang-up summer session for theater-director-turned-professor Claire Gray with a new production, a new love, and a dead body.
Claire, a former Broadway director and now head of the Theater Department of Desert Arts College in Palm Springs, is running her summer workshop for the first time. The play she will direct is a staged version of the film Rebecca, and playing the female lead is Paige Yeats, daughter of the college's founder and president, D. Glenn Yeats. While rehearsals for the play go well, not everything else does. Yeats's second ex-wife, Felicia, storms into town and makes demands for a Santa Barbara home she received as part of the divorce settlement. When she is discovered poisoned in her hotel room, the real show begins as Claire must wade through a long cast of suspects to find her murderer.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Reading Craft's fourth and possibly final Claire Gray mystery (after 2004's Desert Spring) is like attending an enjoyable play in which you already know the ending-satisfying, but no surprises. Claire applies her detecting skills to figuring out who poisoned Felicia, the troublemaking ex-wife of D. Glenn Yeats, software tycoon founder of Desert Arts College, where Claire teaches a summer workshop on the stage version of Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca, the many allusions to which almost telegraph the denouement. Short on action and leisurely paced, this gracefully written tale focuses on relationships, including those Claire shares with gay friend Grant, costumer Kiki and Grant's cop brother, Larry, the lead investigator and Claire's new love.
