Böcker utgivna av Cecelia Tichi

Newport Summer 1899-yachts, balls, and famed artists eager to paint portraits of Society's "Queens."Western silver heiress Val Mackle DeVere (Mrs. Roderick W.) agrees to "sit" for a portrait for her beloved Roddy, only to stumble on a scene of bloody, grisly homicide at an art gallery.Like a figure from Pompeii, the dead Newport gallery manager screams in silence, his hands like claws clutching at a gilt frame pulled down over his head and shoulders while blood darkens his cream-colored suit. Impulsive, Val reaches for the murder weapon and will find herself suspected, shamed, and shunned as she seeks the killer while learning yet again a lesson taught by Cornelius Vanderbilt IV: "No city on earth is as hostile to outsiders as Newport."

As a girl in the West, Valentine Mackle dodged quicksand along the rivers of the mining camps, but as Mrs. Roderick W. DeVere of New York's Fifth Avenue, Val is sucked into Society's own quicksand in Spring, 1899, when a weekend at a country estate in the Hudson Valley turns deadly. Val's "soul sister" drowns on family property, and the host's best "practical jokes" double as death traps.A Gilded Drowning Pool snarls Val and husband Roddy in a bogus adult health camp, a brothel, a town-and-country pocked with probable killers-and an ambitious police chief convinced that Val and Roddy DeVere played a part in the death that is ruled a homicide.

New York''s "Diamond Horseshoe" balcony in the Metropolitan Opera House glittered with ladies'' jewels in January 1899, and Society seated in private boxes heard Mozart''s murder victim sing his song of death-unaware that the sudden death of a "Coal King" in Box 18 will be ruled a homicide.When opera-goers Val and Roddy DeVere are asked to investigate ("on the q.t."), Val finds herself suspected of complicity in the murder.The police have "material evidence" against her. Before a jury, Val''s lawyer husband reminds her, "''material'' evidence can be the bright, shiny object that overrides all reason and fact."