A Veiled Antiquity - Hardcover

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Torie O'Shea, who debuted in last year's Family Skeletons (LJ 3/1/97), suspects that a woman's fatal fall down some steps was not accidental, so she begins sleuthing. Charming, down-to-earth characters and gentle humor.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Missouri historical tour guide and genealogist Torie O'Shea (Family Skeletons, 1997) brings down-home sensibilities and acute insights into small-town life when she investigates the death of a reclusive woman whose body is found at the bottom of her basement steps. Although the woman was not a native of New Kassel, Torie is surprised at the lack of kinfolk at the funeral and at the woman's will, which states that no one outside the town can bid on her antiques-filled house. Poking into the woman's home while doing a little informal detecting, Torie finds a key and some old documents written in French taped to the underside of the kitchen table. She and the sheriff are stunned when the woman's documents appear to point to the identity of the famous man in the iron mask. What, they ask themselves, would someone in a small Missouri town be doing with such valuable letters? While it may be overreaching to pose the answer to that well-known French conundrum in a small middle-American town, MacPherson's genial exploration of village relationships and neighborly nuances carries its own raison d'etre.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Welcome back to New Kassel, Missouri, where the citizens drink Dr. Pepper, go on hayrides, and flirt with their spouses--and where somebody has thrown Marie Dijon down her basement stairs, ransacked her grave, and run genealogist Victory O'Shea (Family Skeletons, 1997) off the road when her interest in the case gets a little too strong. Torie's convinced that the secret the grave-robber was looking for lay in the papers Torie filched (in a pricelessly unconvincing nocturnal visit with her two small children) from Marie's housepapers that tie Marie's death not only to a local suicide in 1922, but back three hundred years to Louis XIV's Man in the Iron Mask. And she's willing to take on the most unlikely allies: the playfully hostile sheriff, who's now conducting an affair with Torie's wheelchair-bound mother (!), a translator who can help Torie with the labyrinthine French of Marie's letters, even the blustery town gossip, who sets a sublimely ingenuous trap for the killer by announcing in her newspaper column that Torie's sitting on the vital evidence. Fans of Joan Hess may find the odd chuckle in this warmhearted album. For readers less infatuated with small-town comedy, the big news is that the Man in the Iron Mask isn't Leonardo DiCaprio. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.