Synopsis
When she's invited to teach at the elegant Easton Arts Retreat's 50th anniversary celebration, Lindy Haggerty happily accepts. After all, this prestigious institution is set in bucolic upstate New York in a gigantic mansion and is practically synonymous with summer dance. But instead of guiding her talented and quirky dancers to new heights, Lindy finds herself mired in betrayal, twisted desires-and a brutal death. The body of Larry Cleveland, a rebellious scholarship student who had few friends and a lot of rough edges, is found at the bottom of a nearby cliff. The evidence points to a simple accident. But the local sheriff, who has an ax to grind, wants to use the mishap to blacken the reputation of the Retreat and open the door to big-city developers. It's up to Lindy to find out what's really going on and who would have wanted Larry dead. With a ruthless killer closing in, Lindy takes the first position in the art of detecting: do whatever it takes to stay alive.
Kirkus Reviews
As rehearsal director of the Jeremy Ash Dance Company, Lindy Graham-Haggerty (High Seas Murder, 2000, etc.) has the plummy perk of traveling alongside her best friend Biddy McFee, the company's business manager, to a host of exciting locations for a series of gala recitals. If only she didn't run into one pesky murder after another along the way! The minute she gets off the bus at the Easton Arts Retreat in upstate New York, she's confronted with the latest: Larry Cleveland, one of the teenagers at the Retreat's summer dance camp, has met his untimely demise the day of the Ash troupe's arrival by plunging into a ravine. Not only does the death of streetwise, manipulative Larry cast a pall over the Retreat's founders-wealthy, elegant Marguerite Easton and her slightly addled brother Ellis-but it brings troglodyte Sheriff Byron Grappel onto campus, where he can harass his former sweetheart, Chi-Chi Stokes, by trying to pin the murder on her husband, Robert. Lindy so wants to solve this case that she wades through all sorts of sordid liaisons, straight and gay, romantic and financial, to discover who might want to see young Larry dead-or see the Eastons discredited. But the relationship she can't quite sort out is her own with retired detective Bill Brandecker, whose unrequited feelings for married Lindy bring him into the case all too closely on the Eastons' side. Freydont's third entombs a neatly turned, briskly paced, well-clued mystery in dreary country-house melodrama.