Deadly Beloved

For more than twenty years, Patsy MacLaren Willis led a charmed life behind the wrought-iron gates of exclusive Fox Run Hill...chatting at the country club, basking by the pool, enjoying all the peace and privacy only money can buy. So why then, on an early-summer morning, did privileged Patsy MacLaren pack up her designer clothes, affix a silencer to a Smith & Wesson Magnum, and shoot her husband in his sleep? The Philadelphia police believe it's a case of love gone wrong...especially after the new widow pipe-bombs her car in a downtown parking garage. But former FBI agent Gregor Demarkian, who's going through his own crisis of the heart, thinks Patsy MacLaren's motives go much deeper than that. It's as if the woman deliberately set out to obliterate every trace of herself, to make it look as if she'd never been. Gregor begins his investigation in the posh "gated community" of Fox Run Hill, where women are supposed to shop and play tennis, not commit murder. There he carefully probes into the missing woman's life and into the lives of her neighbors and friends...only to discover a remarkable thing: every Fox Run Hill wife seems to have had a reason for killing her husband, except Patsy MacLaren Willis. While Gregor broods over the subject of love and its fallout and avoids going home, where a neighbor's massive wedding preparations are rekindling painful memories of his beloved late wife, those closest to Patsy are sure that the woman they knew couldn't have murdered anyone. Then a second pipe bomb explodes, with devastating results, and Gregor knows that his time is running out. Now he must find a way to catch a killer wedded to an explosive secret - a coldhearted culprit who's giving marriage a very bad name.


Genre: Mystery