| Description: |
|
Product Description
HANG MY HEAD AND CRY is Elena Santangelo's second novel featuring Pat Montella. Her first novel, BY BLOOD POSSESSED, was an Agatha Award Finalist for Best First Novel. She is also an award-winning writer of short mysteries and ghost tales. Book Description: All Pat Montella wanted was a few fresh-off-the-vine tomatoes. Now that she'd moved from an apartment to live with ninety-one-year-old Miss Maggie Shelby in the retired history teacher's old farmhouse, Pat can finally plant a garden. She picks the spot for it on a whim, after a recurring dream in which a young boy tells her where to dig. As she tills the soil, though, a human skull surfaces. Miss Maggie calls in prominent anthropologist Dr. Emmy Brewster to help solve the historical mystery. However, her assistant, Theo Clayborne, a statuesque and sexy black man with the most beautiful voice Pat's ever heard, quickly becomes the prime suspect in a string of local shootings. Then the ghost of that young boy returns to Pat's dreams, this time with a warning...
Amazon.com Review
Pat Montella, heroine of Elena Santangelo's previous romantic mystery By Blood Possessed, is back in another adventure. As the unpaid director of the Julia Bell Foundation, Pat's collecting unemployment and living on...Magnolia Shelby's Civil War-era estate in Virginia while she waits for her own future to reveal itself. But it's the past that comes clear first when the amateur archaeological efforts of Aunt Maggie and her friends unearth a long-dead body on the property Pat will someday inherit. And it's Pat's unique ability to "see" back to 1870 (and reconstruct through the eyes of a 10-year-old boy named Emancipation the circumstances under which the skeleton met its end) that turns the somewhat creaky wheels of the plot.
More interesting than the contemporary action (which includes a couple of murders connected to secrets that some of Aunt Maggie's neighbors would just as soon stay buried) are the flashbacks to Reconstruction, the racial politics of the post-slavery years, and the fascinating cast of characters who populated Bell Run back then and whose ghosts still haunt the Virginia countryside. This slow-moving but nicely written ghost story should win Santangelo and her heroine new fans. --Jane Adams
|
