Death in a Cold Hard Light

Merry Folger is more than ready for a romantic vacation with her fiancé Peter when fate--and her police chief father--intervenes. Twenty-one-year-old Jay Santorski never should have drowned in the frigid waters off the Nantucket shore. What was the athlete, Harvard scholar, and part-time scalloper doing out alone in the storm-churned bay?

At her father's insistence--and over Peter's objections--Merry returns to the island to investigate, only to be confronted at every turn by false leads and dead ends. And Police Chief John Folger is behind too many of these roadblocks. For the first time, Merry begins to feel she cannot trust her lifelong role model--her own father....

Francine Mathews has worked as a journalist and as a foreign policy analyst.  She is the author of three other Merry Folger novels, including Death in A Mood Indigo.  Under the name Stephanie Barron, she is the author of three bestselling Jane Austen mysteries: Jane and the Unpleasantness at Scargrave Manor, Jane and the Man of the Cloth, and Jane and the Wandering Eye.  She lives in Evergreen, Colorado, where she is at work on Jane and the Genius of the Place(on sale January 1999).


From the Hardcover edition.