Cover Up

"There was nothing particularly clever about solving the case," Molly Miller says about her sleuthing of a murder two years ago on a Palm Beach golf course that bewildered even the FBI and won her local renown as a Floridian Miss Marple (A FairWay to Die/Humanics). "I knew the murderer and the victim better than the police, and I had ample opportunity to watch what went on. In fact, that is the whole secret of detective work - look and listen." But a heist of two valued French paintings from a Palm Beach mansion and a murder in its showplace garden present the seventyish well-to-do matron and self-styled "amateur sleuth" with another opportunity to test her crime-solving savvy. After all, she was one of guests at a dinner party (hosted by her good friend Daphne Caplan, the somewhat younger widow of a world-class financier and art collector) that preceded both crimes on the Caplan estate. Were the crimes related? Could any of the English-reared socialite's other guests have committed either ... or both? Why were the much more valuable Impressionist treasures in the mansion left untouched? And how many cars did Daphne's next-door neighbor, the fabulous Contessa, actually hear late that night? Intrepidly Molly looks and listens while patiently amassing clues and, teaming up once again with FBI Special Agent Emilio Gonzalez, follows the murderer's trail to a shady art auction house and the victim's Miami apartment. But it's at the splashy opening of a new Manhattan gallery where Molly single-handedly uncovers the heist's astonishing motive and identifies the thief, a shocking revelation that had gone unsuspected by everyone else even though the ill-fated schemer had been in plain sight all along.