Title: Body Language (#3 in the Mark Manning series) Author: Michael Craft Published by: Kensington Books, 1999 ISBN: 1-57566-419-4 [hardcover, 273 pages]
The holidays are approaching, but Chicago Journal reporter Mark Manning is anything but joyous. His career at the Journal has maxed out, guilt over the death of a colleague has taken its toll, and another birthday has him contemplating his own mortality. Mark's only emotional bedrock? His lover of three years, handsome architect Neil Waite. But even Neil can't pull Mark out of his midlife slump. What he needs is a major life change.It's waiting for him in his sleepy hometown of Dumont, Wisconsin, where he's made plans to take over the local paper, purchase the rambling old home where he visited as a child, and reacquaint himself with his cousin Susanne and her teenage son, Thad. To Mark, it's a dream come true. The old house has been readied for the holidays, the paper's new editor, Milwaukee transplant parker Trent, is handsome, qualified and gay, and the Christmas snowfall has taken Mark back to happy times in his childhood, and to the memory that inspired a lifelong erotic fantasy. But as he soon discovers, the promise of a new beginning is shaded in something sinister. It begins with a series of threatening letters. With Thad's violent outbursts. And, with murder.
Just days before Christmas, Mark discovers Suzanne lying in a pool of her own blood, felled by a blow to the head . . a single cryptic message on her lips. It is that dying word that leads Mark into the darkest recesses of Suzanne's life, and the even darker regions of his own past, where the most dangerous of secrets are buried deep in a bitter, and deadly, family plot.
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