Perdition House

From the ashes of the past, a voice cries out for justice... Still recovering both physically and emotionally from the brutal murder of her husband, financial consultant Bay Tanner finds herself enmeshed in crime when a shirttail cousin Mercer Mary Prescott drops disastrously into her life. Jailed for vagrancy, Mercer appeals to Bay's father, a wheelchair-bound retired judge. Vulnerable one moment, sly and secretive the next, the scruffy young woman seems obsessed with the history of Bay's aristocratic family. Her prying is interrupted, however, when she is hauled from the Judge's antebellum mansion and charged with trespassing at a nearby nuclear facility. Bay's relief at the departure of her meddlesome cousin is short-lived as a procession of dangerous characters come gunning for Mercer, now on the run after escaping from her police escort. When Bay's housekeeper is viciously attacked, she launches her own search, enlisting the aid of computer wizard Erik Whiteside and her brother-in-law, sheriff's deputy Red Tanner. As the body count rises and Bay finds herself confronted by a group of ruthless anti-nuke fanatics, only Mercer can explain the connection between the terrors of the present and the long-buried secrets of "Perditon House." Like the two previous Bay Tanner novels, "Perdition House" is an original and complex mystery filled with the breathtaking beauty of the South Carolina Lowcountry and the unique social customs of a Southern aristocracy still clinging tenaciously to its traditions.