When Richard
“Dick” Burnette, Dean of the Stockman School of Music, near
Chicago, is murdered at a gala school costume party, everyone
saw who did it—Renato Ancari—a celebrated conductor who many
thought to be the victim’s best friend. But the Dean has been
carrying on an illicit affair with Emily Ancari, his friend’s
wife.
Rich and
talented, the Dean had but one weakness—women. And this time he
took up with the wrong woman.
Emily had tried
to break off her romance with the Dean, and had even consulted
with a fortune teller to cast a spell on her to root out her
forbidden passion. But the fortune teller did not have such
powers and referred the woman to another spiritualist in
Arizona.
When the
fortune teller is mysteriously murdered, and the Dean’s
daughter, Leah, is found at the scene of the crime in possession
of the murder weapon, it falls to the Dean’s private secretary
and confidant, Oscar Paige, to solve the grisly puzzle.
Even veteran
homicide detectives, Gene Loretto and Sam Montgomery do not
completely buy the official conclusion about the daughter’s
guilt. Perhaps the secret lay with a grizzled gun dealer in
Waycross, Georgia, or with Leah’s husband, Scott, or on a tiny
Greek island with the Dean’s estranged wife, Diane.
It is not until
the very last page of the novel that everything comes to light.
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