The Dying Room - Hardcover

Giroux turns her attention from a series of cases involving London lawyer Robert Forsythe (A Death for a Dodo, etc.) to a story about Karen Dancer, a young widow who has returned, with eight- year-old daughter Jamie, to her hometown of Hampstead, Ontario. She hopes to gain strength for her just-achieved New York job and to build up Jamie after a severe case of measles. But moving into the huge old house willed to her years before, in which her cousins Ashley (the town's mayor) and Sybil are living, Karen soon discovers there is no peace to be had in Hampstead. An offer has been made to buy her house and farmland for the site of a nuclear plant, and the town is up in arms. Meanwhile, Karen and Jamie are the targets of verbal and physical harassment that becomes ever more vicious. There's support from: Mac, the family's longtime cook and housekeeper; Dr. Jim Miles, an old flame; Cal Trent, an engineer for the developers; aged Uncle Alfred, and various friends from high-school days--but the attacks steadily escalate, leaving a trail of bodies, until Karen, in a deadly confrontation, uncovers motive and murderer. A fine sense of menace at the start is dissipated as the plotting grows more unbelievable, none of it helped by stock characters and wooden romancing. Spottily intriguing, but the author does better with her British hero. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Giroux ( Death of a Dodo , etc.) turns away from her series hero, London attorney Robert Forsythe, to track the plight of a beleaguered young mother in this sluggish, melodramatic romantic mystery set in the small town of Hampton, Ontario. Karen Dancer, a career woman and widow in New York, brings her eight-year-old daughter, Jamie, to Hampton and the huge old house she lived in as a child. Soon Jamie's stuffed panda is discovered pitchforked in a barn and then her kitten is found eviscerated in the "dying room," the downstairs bedroom that holds a childhood terror for Karen. Could someone be trying to scare Karen out of--or into--selling land she owns to a company that intends to build a nuclear power plant? Karen is pursued by two ardent swains as the threats escalate until finally Jamie is kidnapped. Many of Hampton's unpleasant characters who fear the outsiders a nuclear plant might bring to town are cast as red herrings to distract attention from the real culprit, a local killer whose deadly activities have raised some citizens' suspicions for years.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.