From Publishers Weekly
Heading for a family gathering at her father's home/water garden business in rural California, widowed Sarah Drexler anticipates a respite from her work as an Oregon state judge. Instead she finds her deductive skills challenged and the lives of those dearest to her threatened. Joining the tense family dinner is Fran Donatio, a woman whose presence Sarah's father Ralph does not explain. The next morning, after Ralph's body is pulled from a lily pond, police Lt. Arthur Fernandez arrives with questions on another matter: Fran, a PI, was shot not long after leaving the dinner, and it looks like the murderer ransacked her office and apartment. Sarah becomes decidedly snappish when the police suggest that her adult children, Winnie and Virgil, and Ralph's brother and nephew all had ample opportunity to search Fran's digs. When the judge turns sleuth, she learns that her loved ones harbor past and present secrets of which she had no inkling. That Sarah's investigation is first-rate is no surprise--the prolific Wilhelm ( Death Qualified ; Seven Kinds of Death) is also accomplished. This tale, however, offers a bonus in Fernandez who, running his own, equally intelligent investigation in the background, provides a welcome change from the expected solitary-sleuth plot structure.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Kirkus Reviews
The morning after Judge Sarah Drexler arrives at her elderly father's place in East Shasta, Oregon, the old man, a water gardener, is pulled out of one of his own fountains; and a week later, news comes that a Fran Donatio, a private detective he'd hired, was killed on the road back home. What was Donatio investigating for Ralph Kellerman--some secret that would've ruined his brother Peter's chances of getting a prestigious chair in biochemistry or his nephew Michael's new job as a university provost? The financial status of the Lister Institute, honeycombed with Kellermans? Or the truth about the disappearance of three boys from Ghost Lake 30 years before and the haunting of the lake ever since? And will Sarah find it in herself to use the facts she gathers against somebody in her family--perhaps one of her own children? Fluent and accomplished, but altogether more routine than Death Qualified (1991), veteran fantasist Wilhelm's truly unusual last excursion into detection. --
Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
