The Lakeside Murders

John A. Miller Jr

Aug 2012 · Victorian Mansion Book 2 · Pima Books

About this ebook

The butler did it, or maybe he didn't. It's summer, and fourteen-year-old Mary Ann Markham is bored. Then she remembers that her wealthy grandfather just happens to own a rather rundown lake a short distance down the hill from his huge Victorian mansion. She enlists her live-in writing coach, Art Parker, and her friend, Jennifer Martin, to help restore the lake and its surroundings to a thing of beauty, using Grandfather's money, of course. Things get off to a good start--that is until they discover the decomposing body of a teenage girl in the woods. Then there's the butler who likes to stargaze, the local youth hostel that just happens to catch fire while Mary Ann and Art are attending a sing-along there, the two bodies discovered in the ashes of the hostel, and the local sheriff who thinks everybody's guilty of something. While fishing from a boat on the lake Jennifer hooks something big--you guessed it--the nude body of another teenage girl. Suspects abound, but especially the new butler, gardener, and housemaid. Time passes. The girls throw a Halloween party at the mansion for their classmates and then disappear. Now Art, with little help from the local sheriff's department, must try to find them and their abductor before they join the growing list of corpses.

About the author

Before retiring in late 2004 John A. Miller, Jr. had worked for more than forty years in the fields of computers and telecommunications at several major corporations and universities. However, he always had a desire to write, so armed with a new computer in 1991 he sat down and began writing his first novel, Pima. Over the years John has continued writing as a sideline.

Because he had lived in southern Arizona for a total of nearly ten years, first while serving in the U.S. Army in the mid-1960s and later while working for a Government contractor and then a private corporation, John decided to set his Pima series of novels in an area he knew well, the mountains and deserts of Arizona. Later short stories and novels are set in other locales. Now John makes his home in eastern Pennsylvania, the area where he grew up.