The Ghost Women
Lola Germany has returned to her hometown on Waverly Island, abandoning her dancing dreams in New York City to pick up her father’s detective badge and, eventually, take over as lead detective. Now it’s 1972, and her affable second-in-command tells her to meet him in the forest, Dead Witch Forest in fact, where a grisly murder scene awaits them.
The dead man is young Abel Montague, a promising painter and student at the St. Luke’s Institute of the Arts. Strangely, his corpse is suspended upside-down from a tree known as the Ghost Tree, and arranged in a way that mimics exactly the tarot card stuck in his back pocket. Even more disturbingly in this gripping novel, Abel isn’t the last student to die with a tarot card by his side.
As Lola tries to find the killer, she learns about the strange, witchy ways of Abel’s girlfriend Pearl and her group of female friends. One of them believes firmly in the ghost of her European ancestor, Matilda, who was burned as a witch on this island off the coast of South Carolina over five hundred years earlier – and yes, you did that math correctly.
Nothing about the history of Waverly Island is as it appears, and it’s up to Lola and Pearl to uncover the truth. If they can, they may save more innocents, or perhaps the guilty. And they may have a chance to undo a curse as old as the pre-Columbian St. Luke’s monastery that hosts the school. That particular historical claim stretches credulity, as do the cartoonishly evil men in blood-red robes who pop up now and then. But overall, the mystery is so engaging that it is easy to let those quibbles wash past, like a South Carolina breeze.
