Showing results by author "Phyllis A. Whitney" in All Categories

For several years, time and circumstance have managed to separate Hallie Knight and her old friend Susan Trench. But when Susan disappears from her grandfather's seaside home on historic Topsail Island, it is Hallie whom Nicholas Trench calls for help. Wealthy, ill, and irascible, he refuses to believe that his beloved granddaughter and the heir to his fortune has been lost to him.

Twenty-five years ago, Susan Prentice lost her mother to a tragic accident. Now she is returning home for the first time to Virginia's eastern shores and the ancestral house whose front steps her mother fell down to her death. Though Susan has little memory of the accident, her arrival has alarmed those who fear what may lie dormant in Susan's memory. But it is her maternal grandmother, Alex Montoro, a proud, intense, aging doyenne of the ballet, who believes that that memory must be unlocked.

Despite her misgivings, child psychologist Lynn McLeod can't ignore the plea to help 10-year-old Jilly Asche, the daughter of her ex-husband, Stephen. But immediately upon her return to Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains, Lynn is drawn subtly into the lives of everyone in the secluded household: Stephen, now an enigmatic stranger; Julian, a mesmerizing family friend who challenges Lynn's ideas of life and death; and Jilly, the beautiful lost child burdened by a terrifying and deadly secret.

Recovering from the death of her son and the end of her marriage, Kelsey Stewart goes to stay with her aunt at her seaside inn in Carmel, California, looking only for retreat. But a local emergency unexpectedly brings Kelsey's troubled heart back to life again. When a young boy falls from one of the sea cliffs, Kelsey, a therapist specializing in brain-damaged children, is recruited to help rehabilitated Jody.

Successful young mystery novelist Molly Hunt, raised by adoptive parents on Long Island, is stunned when a chance encounter leads to a startling revelation. She is apparently the daughter of the aristocratic Mountfort family of Charleston, South Carolina, kidnapped as an infant from their ancestral home - and has an identical twin sister.

The lush, secluded mountains of North Carolina's Lake Lure had drawn Lauren Castle into their spell. It was here, in 1938, that Hollywood's most beloved glamour girl, Victoria Frazer, drowned during a scandalous affair with actor Roger Brandt. Few knew about the baby spirited away into the night. That baby was Lauren's mother.

Jennifer still vividly remembers the day when, momentarily distracted, she left her three-year-old daughter, Debbie, unattended in a grocery cart. When she turned back, the child had vanished. For seven years, there had been no sign of Debbie. Then one day, Jennifer receives a mysterious phone call from the wealthy Corinthia Arles, claiming that she has found her daughter.

Hallie Knight is summoned to a historic seaport town by Nicholas Trench, the critically ill grandfather of her former college roommate. Months earlier, Trench's granddaughter Susan mysteriously disappeared from his home and all attempts to learn her fate have failed. He feels that if anyone can find Susan, it will be this woman who was his granddaughter's closest friend.

Lacey Elliot has been a woman without a past since the day her mother whisked her off to Charlottesville, refusing for 30 years to speak of her father, her family or her history. But when Lacey intercepts a desperate letter from an aunt in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, she sees her chance to confront the past that has terrified her mother and to fill in the gaps in her own life. Against the charm and the colorful, turbulent history of the picturesque town, the violent history of Lacey's own heritage is about to repeat itself.

Christy Loren has come to fear her gift of clairvoyance, an unwanted legacy from her mother, a famous psychic. Without warning, visions envelop her - visions that have guided the police, too late, to the bodies of murder victims. To escape these horrors, Christy flees her home in Long Island to seek peace and safety in the foothills of Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains and the reassuring presence of her down-to-earth aunt.

Hollis Sands has never gotten over her husband's death. Ricky had been a famous popular singer, and she wrote her best songs for him. Hollis can't believe he took his own life. Perhaps it was something else...murder. Finally, at Windtop in Cold Spring Harbor, Hollis finds sanctuary, and begins to put in place the pieces of her life. But strange and frightening things keep happening. Voices sing the song "Rainsong" that she wrote for Ricky. Guitars play from nowhere.

Successful author Molly Hunt, the adopted daughter of Long Island parents, is stunned when a handsome man she meets in her publisher’s office makes a startling declaration: that he is about to marry her twin sister. Molly soon discovers that she is actually the long-lost child of the wealthy Mountfort family of Charleston, South Carolina. Eager to solve the puzzle of her birth, Molly begins a fateful journey south.