“The past has driven me back here,” Beth Gray says when she returns to Wilder with her little girl, fifteen years after being convicted of murder. Sheriff Les Kendall advises her to leave, but he doesn’t know Beth can’t escape her nightmares.

When Beth Gray was seventeen, a fourteen-year-old boy was shot in the woods near her home, and Beth was convicted of killing him. She spent six years in prison for a murder she didn’t commit.

Several years after being paroled, she’s a partner in her ex-husband’s clothing design firm, creating knitwear under the fashion label, “Liz Palmer.” No one suspects Liz Palmer was once convicted of murder. Beth is an avid knitter, talented designer and artist. With her small daughter, she leads a solitary existence separate from the rest of her family. Yet the pall of the murder conviction hangs over her, and nightmares of the past have pursued her in her sleep, growing more disruptive to her life over the years. Beth spent many sleepless hours knitting and painting, creating sweaters, portraits and landscapes, attempting to escape her past.

Fifteen years after the Stevens boy’s death Beth has returned with her daughter, Abby, to visit Abby’s grandmother at the Lodge, the old, closed lakefront hotel in the Sierras where Beth grew up. Beth would like to stay and reopen the old hotel, if only she can clear her name. She delves into the shadows of her repressed memories and evades the real killer hidden somewhere in the breathtaking backdrop of mountain scenery, even as she allows herself to love again, drawn in by Peter Lloyd’s caring nature.

Another murder is committed, and the evidence points to Beth. The threat of death or a return to prison drives Beth to cling to Peter’s love as she faces personal ruin, and an unseen enemy hidden in the shadow terrors of her childhood nightmares.

Shadows Fall has been described many ways, as romantic mystery, psychological suspense, and even by Nancy Marple as “. . . an Americanized traditional English Country House mystery with a bitter underlying twist.”

Sample chapters of Shadows Fall are available on my website, and either the trade paperback edition or a Mobipocket PDA ebook may be obtained via the Shadows Fall Purchase Page.

P.S. 11-13-2004 - I’m an avid knitter myself, and while knitting plays a minor, background role in Shadows Fall, it plays a major role in my life.