Sad Water

Nadianna Jesup, a pregnant young photographer from rural Georgia, is visiting Mayley, a village in Yorkshire, England, on an arts grant when she discovers a burned corpse floating in a river. No one, includinghistorian Gale Grayson, Nadianna's companion on the trip, believes her, except for a local religious group that thinks she has witnessed a vision from God. Strange events surrounding the old mill that Nadianna and Gale aredocumenting bring to light tensions among some of the colorful inhabitants of the town, including Chalice Hibbert, a six-foot-seven mute; her employer, potter Olivia Markham; and Gerald Thornsby, a thief-turned-preacherwho opposes Olivia's efforts to turn the abandoned mill into an artist's mall. In this, her latest mystery featuring Gale Grayson, Holbrook (The Grass Widow) intersperses her contemporary tale with excerpts from the tragicdiary of a Luddite named Michael Dodd. This psychological mystery, although hampered at times by clich s about Americans abroad, succeeds in evoking the bleakness of the depressed mill town and in portraying the familybonds that drive the characters to acts of desperation.

Historian Gale Grayson, her photographer prote+a7ge+a7e Nadianna Jesup, and her young daughter, Katie, come to the bleak Yorkshire village of Mayley to document the town's tragic history, only to come face to face with a horrifying crime with links to a century-old secret. By the author of A Far and Deadly Cry. Original.

Gale Grayson revisits England to help a friend complete a photographic essay on an old Yorkshire mill, built along a stretch of river known as Sette Water. But what begins as an artistic exploration soon takes a darker turn when a horribly burnt corpse floats down the river and into their lives. What Gale doesn't know is that this is just the first strand of a web of intrigue so deeply woven into the local history that it will take uncovering a hundred-year-old secret to find the truth.