Anne-Marie Sutton
Amateur sleuth Caroline Kent and Newport Police Detective Hank Nightingale are reunited in this second in the Newport Mystery Series. What had begun as a promising relationship between the two in Murder Stalks A Mansion has ended It is only when another mansion murder occurs that the two are brought back together to solve this new case.
The gala June engagement party of Imogen Revel in the ballroom of Mon Plaisir, her family's Newport mansion, is tragically interrupted by the death of her fiancé Hugh after drinking from a glass of poisoned burgundy. The death becomes even more mysterious when it is discovered that the glass had been Imogen's, not Hugh's. Which was the intended victim? Caroline, who had been standing next to Hugh when he collapsed, becomes the chief witness whom Hank must question when he arrives at Mon Plaisir to investigate the murder. But before this case is solved, Caroline faces deadly danger from an unexpected adversary and gains surprising insight into her relationship with Hank.
Anne-Marie Sutton has lived in Newport, Rhode Island. She used her knowledge of the city and its fabulous Gilded Age mansions to craft her first mystery novel, Murder Stalks A Mansion. Gilded Death, second in the Newport Mystery Series, also features the team of amateur sleuth Caroline Kent and Newport Police Detective Hank Nightingale. A journalist and marketing/communications consultant, Ms. Sutton now resides in Connecticut. She has lectured on mass communications at the college level and is the author of two plays, The Sunshine Soldier and Margaret Sloane (D-NY). She was born in Baltimore and graduated from the University of Maryland with a degree in English.
Hugh Dockings was dead. That this was true, no person in the elegant crowded ballroom who had heard the last gasp of life expel from his shaking body could doubt. A few of the guests had been close enough to see his startled face, that first stunned expression which was rapidly overtaken by the recognition that something was terribly wrong. Then the look of final panic when Dockings's whole being realized the useless fight he was making to forestall the inevitable.
What were his last thoughts? Surely his entire concentration was on survival, not the flashing of the fifty-five years of his life before him, nor the fear for what hellish place would be his in after-death.
He must have heard the music stop. The interruption was triggered not by Hugh Dockings's falling, for that was out of the sight of the string quartet, but by the sound of the woman screaming. The music's amiable melody was sharp in its stop, right in the middle of a Mozart trill.
High above the startled guests, smoky rays from the June sun continued down through the room's towering Gothic windows of ancient stained glass which traced its lineage back to the thirteenth century in France. The huge ballroom was one of Newport, Rhode Island's finest architectural wonders. It was a refined setting with walls of French silk damask set in panels outlined in carved oak and ceilings dotted with brilliant chandeliers in the curling style of the French Renaissance.
At the sound of the scream, waiters held their heavy silver trays laden with champagne glasses and wine goblets suspended in mid-air. Waitresses at the overflowing buffet table stared in astonishment. Conversations, some even clever from the effect of the expensive stimulants, ceased. The perfect atmosphere, designed only to celebrate the next day's wedding ceremony, had been shattered like the crystal goblet which had dropped from Hugh Dockings's hand.
