From Publishers Weekly
When Frances Pratt, formerly of the Suffolk County (New York) DA's office, returns for her cousin's wedding to the tony Massachusetts town where she spent childhood summers, she expects a somewhat stuffy weekend-but then Hope Lawrence, the beautiful, bulimic and troubled bride, doesn't show up at the altar. Frances, who's now the president of the Long Island Coalition Against Domestic Violence, finds Hope hanging from a light fixture, an apparent suicide. Frances isn't convinced, however, so she teams up with the good-natured but tough cop Elvis Mallory to find out the truth. There are suspects aplenty: Hope's jealous half-sister, her violent ex-boyfriend (with whom Hope was still intimate) and her fiance's snooty parents, who opposed the marriage. Meanwhile, Hope's own parents harbor a long-buried secret, and the local minister, who was Hope's confidante, has mysterious connections to events as well. The story is a familiar one, competently if not elegantly told through multiple viewpoints. In her second gumshoe outing (after 2001's Misfortune), Frances once again plays the career woman exposing the dirty secrets of the moneyed classes, but Geary's evocations of buttoned-up privilege ("We're WASPs, remember? We don't talk about problems") fails to go beyond glancing and superficial. Fanny's affair with her sweet, potato-farming next-door neighbor offers a break from all the whodunit speculation, but these interludes are few and far between. Poor Hope may be the most interesting character here, in part for her troubles and in part for her necessary silence, which lends her a kind of dignity that many of the other characters lack.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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Frances Pratt, retired criminal investigator, has recently suffered the loss of her stepmother. She attempts to escape her sorrow by way of attending a cousin's wedding amid the clapboard mansions in a lovely, but snooty, New England town. Vivienne Benesch's characterization of Frances Pratt reveals an intelligent, intuitive sleuth unable to escape mystery and tragedy. When Pratt's cousin is found hung on her wedding day, Benesch intensifies the pace as the plot focuses on every detail of the snobbish inhabitants of this upscale haven and all their possible motives. She portrays the characters as quirky, self-obsessed, and private, making the suspense all the more intriguing. B.J.P. © AudioFile 2003, Portland, Maine--
Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine
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