Southern Ghost Author:Carolyn G. Hart Immersed in the very present delights and details of running the Death on Demand bookstore, Annie Laurance Darling had little time for the spirited history of the South Carolina Low Country. If her ditzy mother-in-law insisted on taking up ghost-hunting, risking body and soul to interview not only the haunted but also the ghosts themselves-well... more », what was a body to do?
But Annie's attitude is about to change when gossip about her husband, Max, and a beautiful blonde burns her ears. By the time she's faced down a hostile police chief and bailed Max out of the Chastain, South Carolina, jail, the lady has vanished, Max is the prime suspect in an unspecified crime,a nd the baffling bloodstained trail leads straight to the doorstep of Tarrant House, home of a venerable southern family with a violent history dating back to the Revolution-and ghosts of a far more recent vintage.
Under the formidable gaze of the elderly Miss Dora, the Tarrants gather, forced by current events and the sinister disappearnace of Miss Courtney Kimball, to reexamine the past-that terrible day two decades past when Judge Tarrant apparently suffered a fatal heart attack upon learning that his favorite son, Ross, had committed suicide.
Annie unravels the tangled tales of eccentric Milam and his alcohol-sodden wife, Julia; of Whitney, lazy lawyer and blurred reproduction of generations of Tarrants; his respectable wife and club woman, Charlotte, more interested in dead Tarrants than live ones; of Sybil, so sublimely careless of her reputation; of Dora herself; and of the Judge's wife, Amanda, whose ghost still walks the bluff from which she fell. As Annie and Max delve into the perplexing conundrum, one thing becomes clear: "tragic coincidence" is a blatant lie.
The dignified facade of Tarrant House hides a hotbed of deadly passions. As the family turns on itself in a mayhem of murderous motives and angry accusations, Annie must summon all her sleuthing skills to stop a desperate killer-who is ready to strike again to keep the secrets that haunt the Tarrants from the light of day...« less