The Works of

Taylor Smith

Deadly Grace

Deadly Grace - Published December 2001 by Mira Books (477 pages - hardcover)

ISBN 1-55166-829-7

Grace Meade, the beautiful war bride of a local hero, has spent the past thirty years living a quiet life and raising her daughter in the small town of Havenwood, Minnesota. Although active in her community, Grace is intensely private about her personal life, particularly about her involvement in the Resistance. These memories she keeps tucked away, along with reminders of a husband lost in the war's final days.

Then, on a cold winter night in 1979, nearly thirty-five years after the flames of war were extinguished in Europe, someone comes looking for Grace Meade. She is tortured and killed, and her house set ablaze. Incredibly the prime suspect is her own daughter, Jillian.

Quiet and bookish, historian Jillian Meade seems an unlikely candidate for murder. But everyone in town knows she and her mother were estranged. Jillian left town years ago, moving to Washington and rarely coming home to visit. Yet just hours before Grace's murder, Jillian is spotted filling a gas can at a local service station. Later that evening, neighbors hear the two women arguing inside the house.

Rescued from the burning house, Jillian seems to be in shock, unable -- or unwilling -- to speak. After a suicide attempt, she is placed in a psychiatric lockdown. But three days later, while in the custody of the deputy chief of police, Jillian disappears and the deputy is found murdered.

Even before this latest killing, Federal Agent Alex Cruz has been on Jillian's trail. Grace Meade, it turns out, is not the only veteran of the anti-Nazi underground to have recently met with a violent end. Two former Resistance members in Europe have also been killed, and both of them -- Cruz's Interpol contacts report -- had been visited by Jillian Meade just hours before their deaths.

Cruz's only clue to the mystery is a journal dropped at the murder scene. Together with the research notes found in Jillian's Washington office, it tells the incredible story of a wartime heist of Nazi gold -- a fortune that has never been recovered.

Could greed for the missing gold have pushed Grace Meade's daughter to commit murder? Or is it something else only hinted at in Jillian's notes -- a horrifying account of personal betrayal? Alex Cruz intends to find out. But can he put a stop to the killing before anyone else is forced to pay the ultimate price?

This book will be available from in unabridged or abridged cassette form ISBN 1-552042-92-8.