Fadeaway Girl (Emma Graham Series #4)

by Martha Grimes

Overview

For waitress and cub reporter Emma Graham, tragedy defines where she lives. Spirit Lake, La Porte, and Lake Noir have been held in thrall by intertwined crimes: the murders of Mary-Evelyn Devereau, Rose Queen, and Fern Queen; the supposed kidnapping of a four-month-old baby from the Belle Ruin hotel twenty years previously; and, most recently, the attack on Emma. And with the arrival of an unexpected visitor and a drifter, it looks like the bad times have only begun...

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780451235640
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	02/07/2012
Series:	Emma Graham Series , #4
Pages:	336
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.90(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Martha Grimes is the bestselling author of eighteen Richard Jury mysteries and also the acclaimed fiction Foul Matter, Cold Flat Junction, Hotel Paradise, The End of the Pier, and The Train Now Departing.

Hometown:

Washington, DC and Santa Fe, NM

Date of Birth:

May 2, 1931

Place of Birth:

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Education:

B.A., M.A., University of Maryland

Website:

http://www.marthagrimes.com

Editorial Reviews

…Emma uses sheer cunning and devious methods of interrogation to pry information from the colorful characters she finds at well-trafficked spots like the Rainbow Cafe. They all quicken to life under Grimes's Dickensian touch, but none more so than Emma. She may keep losing herself in the past, but she's far too vital to fade away.
—The New York Times

Marilyn Stasio

Twelve-year-old Emma Graham investigates the kidnapping of Baby Fay 20 years earlier. The sharp tones of Kim Guest's voice aptly imitate the whiny main character as she drones on about life in La Porte, Maryland. Guest favors high tones and Southern accents for the female characters and softer, deeper intonations for the male characters in Grimes’s story. In between working at Hotel Paradise, run by her mother, Emma traipses around town poking her nose into everyone’s business. If the listener has trouble following the plot, take heart—this is the sequel to BELLE RUIN, and the fourth in a series. Guest connects emotionally with the story, slipping into Emma’s persona. But the story is difficult to follow and tends to involve characters only Emma cares about. M.B.K. © AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine

JUNE 2011 - AudioFile

The latest installment in the endless carnival of crime at sleepy La Porte, Md., involves still another return to the storied past.

Now that she's untangled the mystery of exactly which members of the Queen family killed which other members (Cold Flat Junction, 2001), Belle Ruin waitress/cub reporter Emma Graham, 12, is confronted by an even more vexing case: the disappearance 20 years ago of Baby Fay from the loving embrace of Morris and Imogen Slade. Or not exactly, since the infant was being minded, not very vigilantly, by babysitter Gloria Spiker, who returned from an extended phone conversation with Prunella Rice to find her charge gone. The setup echoed that of the famous Lindbergh kidnapping, right down to the telltale ladder, but there was never a ransom demand, and never a sign of Baby Fay since then. Rumor has long maintained that Imogen's father, Lucien Woodruff, kept the police investigation at bay for the first crucial hours, presumably in order to conceal some family secret. Now Emma, provoked alike by kleptomaniac spinster Isabel Barnett's claim to have seen Baby Fay after the abduction and the recent return of Morris Slade to town, is determined to get at the truth. Other 12-year-olds would be daunted, but Emma, who's already confronted armed killers and survived her brother's production of Medea, the Musical, methodically begins interviewing possible suspects, who just happen to be her friends and neighbors, and pondering possibilities. Is Baby Fay still alive, or was she killed in the course of the kidnapping, like the Lindbergh child? Did the kidnappers somehow lose her? Was she a changeling whose fate was intertwined with that of some other baby, or a hallucination of Isabel Barnett's? Was there a conspiracy to cover up the real facts of her disappearance? In fact, how many people actually saw her at Belle Ruin?

Emma is as enchanting as the eccentric cast of her hometown.

Kirkus Reviews