Marilyn's Mystery Reads

Book Author: Ellen Crosby

Everything is frantic at the Montgomery Estates Vineyard in Atoka, Virginia, but that is to be expected at harvest time.  What is not expected is the vineyard’s farm manager, Antonio Ramirez, coming to owner Lucie Montgomery with the news that a human skull has been found just outside the family cemetery.

As the saying goes, bad things come in threes.  The unidentified skull is the first; Hurricane Lolita, a category five storm with its possibly devastating impact on the season’s grapes that are waiting to be picked is the second; the arrival of Jean-Claude de Merignac, the wealthy French aristocrat who has come to Virginia to become the winemaker at a nearby vineyard, is the third.  Jean-Claude has a reputation as a playboy with a string a broken hearts behind him, and he is also the man that teenage Lucie had a crush on two decades earlier when she summered in France.

Desperate to harvest the grapes before the storm arrives, Lucie’s only chance is to ask Jean-Claude if he will lend her one of his workers for a day.  Asking the Frenchman for anything isn’t something that Quinn Santori, the Montgomery Estate winemaker and Lucie’s fiancé, is comfortable with, but he realizes he doesn’t have much choice if he wants to get the grapes picked in time.  But that doesn’t mean he’s happy about it.

The medical examiner who examines the skull determines that it’s from the nineteenth century, and Lucie decides she has to know if there’s any possibility that the remains are of a Montgomery family member, so she agrees to a DNA test to find out.  Lucie wonders if the skull proves to be an ancestor, why wasn’t she buried properly in the cemetery rather than outside it?  What could be so dreadful that it would preclude a proper burial?  The answers turn out to be more than two hundred years old.

Harvest of Secrets is the ninth mystery in the Wine Country series, so there is a lot of backstory involved.  But even a first-time reader of the series will enjoy the novel and be able to understand Lucie’s personal history and that of her family.

Ellen Crosby’s own life has the makings of a novel–she was an economist on the staff of the Senate, a journalist, the Moscow correspondent for ABC News, a world traveler, and an ex-pat who lived in Switzerland and Russia.  She obviously has used all these experiences to write a series with a wonderful sense of place, as well as one featuring a strong, independent woman in what many would consider the man’s world of winemaking.

You can read more about Ellen Crosby at this website.

Check out the complete Marilyn’s Mystery Reads at her website.  In addition to book review posts, there are sections featuring Golden Oldies, Past Masters and Mistresses, and an About Marilyn column that features her opinions about everything to do with mystery novels.