Answer Came There None

Sara Marriott looks forward to a pleasantly productive stay in the small town where she has come to ghostwrite the memoirs of a well-known general. Recently divorced, she is pleased to find lodging in the home of Althea Cannon, a local widow and longtime friend of General Schofield.

Then Sara's attention is abruptly and terribly refocused from past to present by the sudden death of her elderly landlady. When poison is found to be the cause, suicide is the most comfortable assumption, but circumstances suggest otherwise. Disclosures about the dead woman's plans to change her will cast suspicion on her intriguing family.

Becoming embroiled in the problems of Mrs. Cannon's almost disinherited son, her unhappily married sculptress niece, and a pair of precocious children, Sara is haunted by an inexplicable message left on her answerphone only shortly before the violent death. Before she can make sense of the connection between the message and the murder, a second death strikes unnervingly close.

Sara can no longer trust any of her new acquaintances, not even the appealing young man who teaches school and writes mystery novels. But it takes yet another murder before Sara fully understands just how much danger can be stored in an answering machine.

Newly divorced journalist Sara Marriot has come from London to the town of Edgewater, taking on the job of ghostwriting the memoirs of gentle, elderly General Schofield. He finds living quarters for her in an apartment in the home of his friend Althea Cannon, an 80-ish widow whose son, Oliver, teaches at the local Agricultural College and lives with her. The basement apartment is occupied by attractive teacher and aspiring author Paul Fryer. Meanwhile, Oliver is thinking of marrying Celia Hancock and moving to Canada--a plan that has moved his possessive mother to change her will, leaving a small fortune to niece Meg Kimberly, wife of farmer Ron, mother of twins Nick and Jill. But before that change can be executed, Althea is found dead in her bedroom--poisoned. Two more killings follow--acts of violence related in a kind of uninflected monotone, interspersed with endless cups of tea, sips of sherry, and the occasional lunch or dinner, as the major characters hash and rehash the various dull facets of the events around them. Bloodless stuff, strictly for Ferrars's devoted following (Danger from the Dead, etc.). -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.