When Lacy Wales receives a frantic letter from a long-lost friend, Rose Murphy Mendez, she hesitates only briefly before showing it to her nice new lawyer boss, Hiram Bascom, and asking his advice. Neither of them can decide if the letter is really a desperate plea for help or the crazed ravings of a deranged woman. Against Bascom's better judgment, Lacy leaves the Manhattan town house where she lives with her widowed stepmother, Inez, and drives to the village in upstate New York where Rose is hiding out. At her distraught friend's request, Lacy serves her a soothing drink of whiskey, and before her horrified eyes, Rose drops dead. Wandering about the house in confusion, Lacy thinks she sees something moving on the grounds behind it, but she is not sure there is actually anything there. Suffering shock upon shock, she finds a snapshot in Rose's bedroom with an astonishing and compromising inscription by Lacy's own fiancé, Richard Blake, who is away on one of his frequent hush-hush assignments for the top-secret Washington government agency where he works. Later, Carlos Mendez, Rose's ex-husband and the wealthy owner of an emerald mine, turns out, incredibly, to be related to Inez.
These are the opening moves in a story that becomes more and more complex. Is Rose's death an accident or murder? If it is murder, will the police officially accuse Lacy of the crime? Will her fiancé come forth to explain? In what way is Mendez still involved with his ex-wife? How will Lacy cope with her growing and disturbing attraction to Hi Bascom? Why does the subject of emeralds keep coming up?
An American author of mystery novels. She had one of the longest careers (from the 1920s to the 1980s) among major American mystery writers (Wikipedia).
