Destroying Angels

Five Star/Gale
The first Leigh Girard mystery

Chicago native, Leigh Girard has fled to Egg Harbor, Wisconsin, a remote artist community on the Door County peninsula, to heal from her recent mastectomy. “Cancer does that—yanks you out of your life,” she observes with her usual wryness. Determined to start a new life, she has left her troubled marriage and teaching career to take a job as a reporter with the Door County Gazette. Her first assignment: an obituary.

While investigating a wrongful death claim by Eva Peck, the widow of a restoration craftsman, Leigh suspects that Carl Peck didn’t die of natural causes, but was murdered. When it’s discovered that Peck, an amateur naturalist, died from mushroom poisoning, Leigh’s suspicions are confirmed. Yet, according to the locals, murder just doesn’t happen here.

The case turns even more puzzling when Peck’s daughter attempts suicide a week after her friend, the local librarian, kills herself. In the process of solving Peck’s murder, Leigh uncovers another murder committed twenty years earlier that links the past with the present.

Her obsession with finding the connection between these two murders puts her in conflict with the community and eventually jeopardizes her life. Confronted once again with her own mortality, Leigh finally faces the emotional scar left by her mastectomy.

Death’s Door

The second Leigh Girard mystery

On the eve of tourist season, the Door County police are about to release a list of area sex offenders, when Janell Margaris, the teenage daughter of a wealthy Chicago real estate developer, disappears near her summer home.

Joining the search team, Leigh combs the desolate Mink River area and stumbles upon a macabre murder scene—a girl’s dead body, carefully arranged to mimic sleep, except for her blonde hair, covering her face.  Brushing the hair aside, a stunned Leigh discovers it’s not Janell, but her friend, Stephanie Everson, the last person to see Janell before she disappeared.  The next day Janell is found hiding on the Washington Island ferry claiming no memory of where she has been.

Leigh’s investigation into Stephanie’s murder draws her into a bizarre and lethal correspondence with the killer.  In his letters, the killer taunts her with a cryptic, literary clue: “The wheel has come full circle.  I am here like a river running through her.”  Before Leigh can crack the killer’s literary clue, a second young blonde woman’s body is found along the Mink River.  Now Leigh races against time to decode the killer’s message before he kills again.