The Alpine Pursuit (Emma Lord Mysteries)

As her myriad of fans can attest, USA Today bestselling author Mary Daheim creates wonderful mysteries peopled with marvelous characters as quirky as they are endearing. The Seattle Times says Daheim is one of the brightest stars in our city's literary constellation-and the popularity of her irresistible Pacific Northwest crime series has swept across the nation.



For a small town newspaper like The Alpine Advocate, a new play at the local community college is big news. Editor and publisher Emma Lord is duty-bound to attend opening night, but expects the amateur enterprise will serve only as a cure for insomnia. The play is dubbed a black comedy, but the only laughs Emma gets are from the bad acting and the wretched script. And while the turgid production makes Wagner's Ring cycle seem like a vignette, the real drama begins just before the final curtain.



Hans Berenger, dean of students, wasn't well known or well liked around Alpine, but the audience found his death scene genuinely convincing-until they realized he wasn't acting. No one can say how or when the blanks in the prop gun were replaced with the real bullets that killed Berenger, but the list of suspects reads like a playbill of the cast and crew. They all had opportunity, access, and their own axes to grind with the thespically challenged dean.



Seeking the assistance of Vida Runkel, the Advocate's redoubtable House and Home editor, Emma Lord vows to unravel a mystery that spirals out into unexpected places. As Emma sets the stage for the most likely suspect, she finds herself in a two-character scene whose next cue could make the resolute editor take a final-and permanent-bow.

Mary Richardson Daheim started spinning stories before she could spell. Daheim has been a journalist, an editor, a public relations consultant, and a freelance writer, but fiction was always her medium of choice. In 1982, she launched a career that is now distinguished by more than sixty novels. In 2000, she won the Literary Achievement Award from the Pacific Northwest Writers Association. In October 2008, she was inducted into the University of Washington's Communication Alumni Hall of Fame. Daheim lives in her hometown of Seattle and is a direct descendant of former residents of the real Alpine, which existed as a logging town from 1910 to 1929, when it was abandoned after the mill was closed. The Alpine/Emma Lord series has created interest in the site, which was named a Washington State ghost town in July 2011. An organization called the Alpine Advocates has been formed to preserve what remains of the town as a historic site.

About Mary Daheim