By Blood Possessed »

Pat Montella is summoned from her dreary office job in suburban Pennsylvania by an unusual request from a stranger: Ninety-one-year-old Magnolia Shelby wants to bequeath to Pat in her will her house and acreage in rural Virginia, and the only condition is that Pat visit during the first week of May to learn what this is all about.

What she finds is Bell Run, a Civil-War-era estate and battle ground inhabited by the enigmatic Miss Maggie, a retired history teacher with a passion for the Civil War. And that's not all, for just as Pat begins to get the lay of the land, she finds herself noticing curiously out-of-date details, like the vibrations of bullets hitting old wood, or the smell of campfire coffee and roast pork, or the faraway hissing of a steam engine. Before too long, she has to admit that what she's hearing, seeing, and smelling are the details of an era long past, the sights and sounds of 1863.

Pat soon begins to "see" enough about these long-ago events to put some of the facts together. But then she learns something extraordinary, and how this knowledge affects Pat and Maggie in 1990s Virginia stirs up some very modern, very real danger.

Publishers Weekly

When Pat Montella receives a letter notifying her that she may be the heir to a large estate called Bell Run near Fredricksburg, Virginia, she's sure her ship has finally come in. Trapped in a boring day job as a business consultant in southern Pennsylvania, she's more than willing to overlook the strange circumstances surrounding her inheritance, including her 91-year-old benefactor Miss Magnolia Shelby's requirement that Pat stay at the old family home during the first week of May. After Pat arrives and learns that Shelby is a legendary history teacher, the request doesn't seem so odd. Pat is the only surviving member of Gabriel Bell's prosperous Confederate family. A stickler for historical justice, Shelby has decided to leave the property to its rightful owner. It's no secret that Bell Run is a developer's dream, however, and local real-estate shark Flora Shifflett wastes no time in making her services available. And Shifflett isn't the only one after the property; a notorious busybody wants the manor house restored for her beloved Historical Society; a rebellious teenager wants the land preserved to safeguard the local environment. As these competing demands plod along a desperately predictable course, the Bell family's dark past slowly comes to light. Before long, ghosts, voodoo dolls and death threats are headed Pat's way. Things take a serious turn when someone shoots at Pat with a rifle and her only rival for the inheritance turns up at the bottom of the nearby river. First-novelist Santangelo writes an atmospheric, entertaining tale, and has created an appealing heroine in Pat Montella. She's often only a hair shy of imitating Nancy Drew here, though, and never quite pulls off the Southern accent so central to the book. (Nov.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.