They Danced by the Light of the Moon

by Tempa Pagel

Overview

Andy Gammon, a former Detroit social studies teacher living in (but not always fitting into) a quaint New England town with her Yankee husband and two children, can't help getting involved whenever history meets mystery. Add in a couple of prime specimens of 19th century architecture-Andy's other passion-and she can't resist sneaking through back hallways of a Victorian grand hotel and crawling through the underground tunnels of a derelict Gothic insane asylum as she seeks answers to why a woman was killed at the Grand Hotel of the Atlantic on the night of the reopening gala, why another woman disappeared from that same room a century ago, and what connection may exist between the two.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781410468024
Publisher:	Gale Group
Publication date:	05/09/2014
Edition description:	Large Print
Pages:	441
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 1.00(d)

Editorial Reviews

12/23/2013
Pagel plays with the everything-old-is-new-again theme in her delightful second Andy Gammon mystery (after 2006's Here's the Church, Here's the Steeple). Andy, a transplanted Midwesterner, doesn't have to try hard to persuade mother-in-law Mayta to join her at the posh grand reopening of the Grand Hotel of the Atlantic on the New Hampshire coast. Victorian architecture is only part of the attraction, however. Further tickling Andy's insatiable curiosity is the lore about a young socialite who vanished from her room at the hotel more than a hundred years earlier. As if the history and the mystery weren't enough, one of Andy and Mayta's dining companions, Claudia Dean, is murdered later that same evening in that very room. The narrative shifts smoothly between 1901 and the present, as the two intertwined stories play out to a satisfying conclusion. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

2013-12-07
A delightful dinner at a posh hotel ends in murder. Former social studies teacher Andy Gammon can never resist a historical mystery. But when she agrees to accompany her mother-in-law, Mayta, to the opening gala at the Grand Hotel of the Atlantic on the beautiful New Hampshire coast, she never imagines that she'll find a body or immerse herself in a turn-of-the-century mystery. Andy's tablemates include the bored boyfriend of Claudia Dean, who's obsessed with the hotel's history, which includes the mysterious disappearance of Marguerite, a young woman who later died in an asylum. When Claudia is found stabbed in one of the guest rooms, Andy's sleuthing instincts kick in, and her long-suffering husband must care for their two children while Andy and Mayta locate and befriend Marguerite's only known relative. Though she was from a well-off family and had become engaged to be married, Marguerite had been unhappy with the path her life was taking. At length, Andy learns that she'd run off from the hotel and married a local fisherman. After he drowned, her father placed Marguerite in a nearby mental hospital, a model of modernity in 1901. Andy goes so far as sneaking into the derelict asylum hoping to prevent another murder with roots in the past. Like Andy's first case (Here's the Church, Here's the Steeple, 2006), this one is studded with flashbacks to the historical past, this time providing provocative insights into the now defunct system of asylums.

Kirkus Reviews