This cross-continental journey had proved very pleasant, particularly considering that he was dead. Or so Timothy ironically mused... The year is 1905, and the heyday of Thames, in the goldfields of New Zealand. Back in 1867, Captain Jake Dexter, a flamboyant adventurer and pirate, and his mistress, the actress Harriet Gray, invested the fortune they made during the gold rushes of California and Australia in a theatre and hotel called the Golden Goose, which has become an internationally acclaimed tourist venue, famous for its Murder Mystery Weekends. Guests gather, and a fake murder is staged, and it is up to them to find the killer. But this hugely successful venture is now at great risk. Timothy Dexter, an American of dubious ancestry, threatens the inheritance of the Golden Goose Hotel, and the Gray family gathers to hold a council of war, interrupted when a real murder intervenes. And a young tourist, Cissy Miller, entrusted with a Harlequin costume and a very strange mission, may be the only one to hold the key to the mystery.
About the Author: Joan Druett is an independent maritime historian and writer, married to Ron Druett, a highly regarded maritime artist. In 1984, while exploring the tropical island of Rarotonga, she slipped into the hole left by the roots of a large uprooted tree, and at the bottom discovered the grave of a young American whaling wife, who had died in January 1850 at the age of twenty-four. It was a life-changing experience. Her immediate interest in whaling captains' wives at sea was encouraged by a Fulbright fellowship, which led to five months of research in New Bedford and Edgartown, in Massachusetts, Mystic, Connecticut, and San Francisco, California, and resulted in her study of whaling captains' wives under sail, Petticoat Whalers. The success of this book, and a companion volume, She Was a Sister Sailor, was followed by Hen Frigates, Wives of Merchant Captains Under Sail, which was given a New York Public Library Best to Remember Award, while She Was a Sister Sailor won the John Lyman Award for Best Book of American Maritime History. Joan Druett's ground-breaking work in the field of seafaring women was also recognized by a L. Byrne Waterman Award. Her non-fiction account of a double castaway experience in the sub-Antarctic, Island of the Lost, has become a classic in the genre. Then her strong interest in the stories of the Pacific Islanders who sailed on Euro-American ships led to a biography of an extraordinary Polynesian star navigator, Tupaia, which won the general nonfiction prize in the 2012 New Zealand Post Book Awards. Joan Druett is also the author of the popular Wiki Coffin mysteries, which have a half-Maori, half-Yankee hero. Her publications, which include three romantic sagas, have been translated into Chinese, French, Italian and German.