TERE HOLBROOK

After a self-imposed exile in England, historian Gale Grayson has returned to her Southern roots, only to find eccentric relativesand murderous scandalalive and well in Statlers Cross, Georgia. Theyd been talking about Linnie Glynn Cane since 1925, about the pecan tree where she was found hanging, and how her ghost never came to rest. No sooner do Gale and her four-year-old, Katie Pru, arrive in town than tragedy strikes again. Martin Cane, a straitlaced, religious man and host of the annual Southern Gospel Singing and Barbecue, turns up deadkilled by a rifle blastin the midst of the festivities. Now it is up to Gale to untangle the twisted facts behind Martins death. Was the motive suicide, greed, revengeor a long-delayed justice? To find out, Gale will have to dig deep into the towns darkest secrets and her own painful past.

Nadianna Jesup, a pregnant young photographer from rural Georgia, is visiting Mayley, a village in Yorkshire, England, on an arts grant when she discovers a burned corpse floating in a river. No one, including historian Gale Grayson, Nadiannas companion on the trip, believes her, except for a local religious group that thinks she has witnessed a vision from God. Strange events surrounding the old mill that Nadianna and Gale are documenting bring to light tensions among some of the colorful inhabitants of the town, including Chalice Hibbert, a six-foot-seven mute; her employer, potter Olivia Markham; and Gerald Thornsby, a thief-turned-preacher who opposes Olivias efforts to turn the abandoned mill into an artists mall. In this, her latest mystery featuring Gale Grayson, Holbrook (The Grass Widow) intersperses her contemporary tale with excerpts from the tragic diary of a Luddite named Michael Dodd. This psychological mystery, although hampered at times by clich s about Americans abroad, succeeds in evoking the bleakness of the depressed mill town and in portraying the family bonds that drive the characters to acts of desperation.

Gale Grayson has come back to Statlers Cross, Georgia, to write, hoping to find in her quiet hometown the strength to confront the memories and mysteries of her husbands life and death. But the delicate balance in the rural community has been altered by outsiders: a family of immigrants and a visiting professor who hopes to study the areas most isolated residents -- families with a dialect and rules of their own.In a place trapped between the present and the past, a shocking act of violence uncovers dark and dangerous truths about people whose roots go back for generations. The ties between the living and the dead are strong, and even the presence of visiting Scotland Yard detective Daniel Halford may not help unravel such a brutal crime. It falls to Gale, her grandmother Ella, and her precocious daughter, Katie Pru, to piece together a terrifying tapestry of history and hatred whose tangled threads weave a complicated tale of betrayal. Yet it is in the photographs of Gales young protegee Nadianna Jesup that the truth may be found ... a truth that is sheer murder for anyone who stumbles across it.

The crime scene showed that a cunning mind and a passionate hatred lay behind the killing of Lisa Stillwell. But New Scotland Yard would not have been called to this remote Hampshire village if the baby-sitters employer hadnt been Gale Grayson, a self-exiled American with a suspicious past. Three years before, Chief Inspector Daniel Halford had watched helplessly as Gales husband put a gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger -- seconds before Halford could arrest him for terrorism. Halford has never forgotten the scene or the pregnant young widow whose life was shattered -- and as he questions her now, he finds past and present emotions blurring his judgment. Yet piece by piece he is discovering some unsettling truths about the life of Lisa Stillwell... and a chilling picture is forming of a village that is not quite as sleepy as it seems.