Murder in Two Tenses

Sally Jean Chalmers knows she's in over her head. She's an editorial assistant with her first big project, a real-life Victorian murder mystery. Its author may not understand syntax, but he can convey the atmosphere of the past as if he'd been there himself. "I lingered by the door with a sense of menace around me," Sally says after just a few days with the manuscript, "as if I'd walked out into 1898 and something darker than humidity haloed the lights." Who killed Kitty McCall, and why? Detective Alfred Warren answered those questions more than a hundred years ago, but author George Whittaker isn't satisfied with his answers. Neither is Sally, not until she understands them. Reaching that understanding means she must scramble in the fog first to save her own life and then to protect, or at least come to terms with, the person she has always loved most.