The Sandhills Bride

Pinehurst, North Carolina: pine trees, sand roads, golf courses, and a polished American resort where money attempts not to look vulgar — and where a young bride has just been found dead on a sandy track beyond the pines; Mrs. Eleanor Drayton was thirty-two, handsome, very rich, and married less than six months to a man who brought charm, a good seat on a horse, and very little else, and her last unposted letter read "I begin to think I have been very foolish — if I am right, remember that I did not go blindly"; when the Belgian Detective and his loyal companion cross the Atlantic at the family's request, they find a husband seen at the stables before dawn, a stable boy who has changed his story twice, a strand of cream silk torn by a signet ring, a burned photograph that did not burn quite enough, grey gloves delivered anonymously, and a man whose love for a woman led him to kill the one person trying to save her; inspired by the unsolved death of Elva Statler Davidson in Pinehurst (1935) while remaining entirely fictional, The Sandhills Bride is an original Golden Age–style mystery about money, marriage, and the American South — where the most dangerous thing a rich bride can do is try to end the cruelty around her.