Summoned to darkness

Summoned To Darkness is a novel of baroque suspense set against the splendor of Venice in 1891, during Festival Season, just as the Panama Canal scandal is breaking. The 90-year-old recluse Giles Demaury, patriarch of the great international art-dealing and auctioneering Demaury family, summons his clan from around the world to gather at his palazzo. He intends to choose an heir to the family fortune, and he makes it quite clear that everyone- including multimillionaire Bostonian Bertrand Demaury with his wife and family, calculating Phillippe and his countess from Paris and the disarming young German Otto von Wuppertal, whose father has recently killed himself because of financial reverse- will be on trial before his decision is made. One by one, they are summoned while he probes their ambitions with knifelike precision as suspicion and hatred thicken among them. Meg, an impoverished cousin of the Demaurys who lives by their grace and favor as companion to the spoiled Esmeralda Demaury, arrives from England. Ignored by the family, she is captive to the romantic overtures of Lord Peter Chalmers, fiance of Esmeralda. One of the guests dies; the first murder has occurred. Prince Lorenzo Giolitti-Crispi, the titled and handsome but penniless chief of police arrives on the scene. Meg becomes his prime suspect. Against the glittering background of the Venetian Carnival and the elegant Boat Races, the mystery deepens culminating with Gile's announcement of the inheritor to his vast fortune. The shock is electrifying