From Publishers Weekly
A young woman seeks the truth behind her sister's death in this fair-to-middling mystery focused on a small town and its secrets. Annie Honeycut dies in a night fall from the roof of the Owen Mansion in Lewiston, Colo., while on an assignment to photograph sites of old murders and scandals. After the funeral, her divorced sister Nora flies in from Iowa to settle Annie's affairs. The last shot on the film in Annie's camera indicates that someone had been near Annie when she fell. After the local police chief discounts her suggestions of foul play, Nora teams up with Annie's lover, Thomas Whitney, whom she finds disturbingly attractive, to investigate. They probe the dark secrets of the old mining town, once dominated by the Owen family, whose last member is an ancient recluse living with an elderly caretaker who had tried to prevent Annie from approaching the house. Allegretto's ( The Suitor ; the Jake Lomax series) tale is marred by one-dimensional characters and a telegraphed solution.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Kirkus Reviews
When her photographer sister, Annie, is killed in a fall from the trellis of Colorado's Owen mansion, where she'd returned, against police orders, to get spooky pictures for a magazine assignment, Nora Honeycut vows, ``I'm going to find out what happened.... No matter what it takes.'' What it takes is a fine disregard for official indifference and threats, and a plan with Annie's beau, Thomas Whitney, to get past the keepers of the mansion--doddering old Chastity Owen and her caretaker--to find out just what misshapen horror (whom local cover-up conspirators from police chief Roy Fellows to heavy-drinking Dr. Everett Newby know as ``Willy'') is living on baby food in the windowless cupola. What in the world could Willy have to do with the Owen mansion's history of homicide (Chastity's grandfather killed his wife; her mother killed her father when he molested Chastity; and five years ago high schooler Bonnie Connor was raped and murdered on the Owen grounds)? By far the wildest of Allegretto's trying neo-gothics (The Suitor, 1992, etc.), with laughably hollow thrills and chills and a penny-dreadful hobgoblin. Free Willy. --
Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
