by Peggy Baseman (Author)
Someone's been playing with the gazpacho in this satirical drawing-room mystery. Marla Stone's nine-acre island estate has sadly fallen into disrepair. Her twenty-four-room French Normandy mansion, guesthouse, stables, cabanas and outbuildings are showing their age. Marla earns a paltry sum teaching cooking and birdsong identification classes in her home, and she's having trouble maintaining the elegant way of life to which she had always been accustomed. Even Acumulada, her loyal maid of thirty years, has agreed to work without wages. Marla's financial salvation arrives in the form of Jack Trumpet, CEO of Conglomotron. He appears on her doorstep one day, asking her to co-host a lifestyle television show with his wife, Barbie Lee. Barbie Lee's dearth of talent is only part of the problem. Marla's dinner guests are stranded overnight on the island. They each question who among them could be capable of murder. Who isn't? With the bridge out, roads closed, phone lines down, and electricity out, the frightened guests must survive another night in the house ... and another night with the killer.