Death by Thunder

After Photographer Janet Upton comes home to New York's Hudson Highlands she sees a man fall from a cliff to his death. She gets photos as she happened to be out on a photo shoot, but the pictures don't come out. And it turns out the man who fell happens to be her uncle by marriage and it just so happens that eight years earlier a woman named Alta Ferguson also fell from the same spot. She had been about to build on the spot and another uncle had been investigated concerning her death. Now Janet wonders could these deaths somehow be related. Somebody apparently doesn't want any building done on this land. And now Alta Ferguson's son shows up and wants to build a house there. And it seems that again, people are going to die to keep a secret or secrets buried. Will one of them be Janet, well of course not, but she gets into some serious trouble. There are plenty of suspects in this fine mystery that was to have been the first in a series, but sadly Ms. Sprague died after the book was finished, so now this story is a stand alone, but it stands very well indeed. Five stars.

In 1987 in Phillips Landing in upstate New York, Paul and Marion Willard get a court injunction to temporarily stop Alta Ferguson from building a swimming pool on her property. Not long afterward Sheriff Investigator Noel Riesbach interrogates the Willards as to where they have been since Alta apparently fell off the side of a cliff at the spot where she was building the pool. In 1995 during a downpour, photographer Janet Upton hears a scream and reports that to the police. The local cops investigate and find the body of Janet's Uncle Broderick Hale dead at the same spot where Alta fell. Feeling there is a link besides the connection to her, as she is also related to Marion and Paul, Janet begins to make inquiries into two deaths. This is a terrific amateur sleuth tale with police procedural ties. Janet needs to know who killed her Uncle though she assumes the motive has to do with his vote as a local councilor on the Steep Slopes Law land use. Interestingly besides the ties through her relatives to the 1987 death, Janet begins to see another connection involving land use that brings her much closer to the killer of her uncle than she ought to be as a second murder is okay in the mind of the culprit. DEATH BY THE THUNDER is a fine regional cozy. Harriet Klausner