Title: Flight Dreams (#1 in the Mark Manning series) Author: Michael Craft Published by: Kensington, 1997 ISBN: 1-57566-174-8 [hardcover, 230 pages]
A woman who vanishes without a trace . . . A man risking his career and his life to find her . . . A search that will lay bare secrets - only to reveal more secrets - secrets someone will kill to keep . . .Seven years ago, on New Year's Day, Chicago socialite Helena Carter disappeared from her fashionable North Shore estate. Ever since, the newspapers have been humming with rumors of foul play - and worse. Now the headlines are blazing even hotter. Because in three months she will be declared legally dead, and the bulk of her fortune will go the the Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago.
Was she murdered, as the city's competing papers insist . . . even going so far as to name her suspected killer? Or had Carter - a devout Catholic - vanished of her own free will, taking flight from a life and a terrible secret no one could even begin to fathom?
Investigative journalist Mark Manning may be the only one in Chicago who believes the missing heiress is still alive. Now his paper has issued him an ultimatum: prove his case before January 1, or his career is over. All Mark has to go on is a powerful sense of justice - and his own instincts.
But if the thirty-nine-year-old reporter has dedicated his career to uncovering the truth, his private life has been built on one enormous deception. Mark is gay - an inescapable truth he has been trying to outrun most of his adult life. Until he finds himself powerfully attracted to Neil Waite, a visiting architect - and the first man to break through Mark's painstakingly erected wall of self-denial.
Coping with mounting pressure form his paper, Mark enters a world seething with guilt and corruption . . . where religion and politics make uneasy bedfellows . . . and where, in an unforgettable night of searing honesty and breathtaking beauty, he discovers what it means to soar. As his relationship with Neil Waite takes him beyond the bounds of what is familiar and known, Mark moves closer to the truth about Helena Carter - a shocking revelation that places his own life at grave risk.
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