Carole Hall is a native of the UK but now an American citizen living in Northern California. After 17 years working in the hotel industry in Los Angeles she opted out of the steel and concrete for softer climes. She has 63 short stories published, and two novels, Killing At The White Swan Inn and Nairobi Bloodstar. She lives and works with her best friend, a massage therapist, in a solar heated home with two cats and a garden full of old roses. She began reading at five years of age when her mother refused to read the end of fairy tales, telling her, “You have to find out for yourself,” So she did.
|
When Margot Costain left her established New York publishing firm after her mother’s death to become owner and manager of the prestigious White Swan Inn in the Berkshires, she did not expect gunfire to erupt on her very first day home. But there it was; an assassination attempt on one of her guests, a Christian wife married to a Muslim businessman, by his Islamic fundamentalist relatives to start off with.
Soon she was wrapped up in the lives of her many guests, from a beautiful trophy-wife model trying to escape her abusive controlling husband, a pot smoking boy violin prodigy with his mother from Spain on his way to Julliard. There’s a destitute Neiman-Marcus business woman whose husband leaves her for his secretary – without any money or credit card. A famous gay English actor and a renowned elderly artist. A convicted murderer recently paroled but wrongly accused of patricide out to clear his name, plus a best-selling author with a tell-all book about a famous Senator. And an assortment of other guests she has to deal with. And into the picture came a detective and a love story that began years before to rekindle the flame. |