Deception Island

By day, he's a bulky, suede-elbowed Shakespeare professor with subversively nontraditional notions. by night, he hunches over his trusty, rusty old Underwood typewriter and secretly becomes Henrietta Slocum---a mystery novelist renowned for her swanky Gilded Age snooper, G. Winchester Hyde.

Twenty-five years have passed since reclusive artist Frances Woodville built a fence around her Deception Island property...shutting out the press, the world, and her old friend Winston. But when a brouhaha that begins with phony art ends with genuine murder, Winston begins to suspect Ms. Woodville might well be better acquainted with the world outside her retreat---and with a mysterious group known as the Holy Fathers.

Double identities can be double trouble, and Winston finds himself and just about everyone he knows enmeshed in a web of deceit that extends for beyond quiet Ainsley, New York. Nobody is quite who they seem. Bogus art. False moustaches. Sham deaths, real stiffs, and a copious correspondence from beyond the grave. Someone has even faked one of Winston's novels and successfully submitted it to his publisher. Murder begets murder, and Winston's life is on the line in his most astonishing intrigue---a Byzantine shocker in which even the corpses have a distressing tendency to slip out of character.

This is #3 in a Winston Marlowe Sherman Mystery.