Bøker utgitt av Cecelia Tichi

Western silver heiress Val DeVere expects nothing but joy at an elegant Newport picnic in 1899, only to be abruptly summoned to New York by a close friend's urgent and cryptic plea: "PLEASE HELP...THEO B."In New York, Theo confides in Val, begging her to save his lively cousin Phoebe from a cunning Irish manservant who, he claims, is plotting her "accidental" death in the Rocky Mountains-just as he allegedly orchestrated the death of her twin sister in Boston a year earlier.Determined to help her friend, Val, now Mrs. Roderick DeVere, tries to convince the headstrong Phoebe to delay her trip to the Rockies. Yet the Irish servant, whom Theo accuses of murder, reminds Val of her beloved late father, an Irish immigrant and "Silver King," whose charm and brogue are unsettlingly familiar.When Phoebe is found murdered in her New York apartment, suspicion falls squarely on the Irishman, appearing to wrap the case up neatly. But for Val, the truth feels far more elusive. Is she blinded by sentiment, or is there another killer lurking in the shadows? As doubt creeps in, Val faces a race against time to uncover the real culprit, all while risking arrest as an accessory to murder.

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."