Small town girl Billie McCadie has big dreams. A cultural linguist and Jane Austen fan with fantasies of working in a museum, marrying a \u201cdreamy archeologist,\u201d and living a life of \u201cnerdy splendor,\u201d Billie works as a seamstress in her hometown of Eastport, Maine. Everything changes the day she receives an envelope in her post office box with no name on it. Inside is a diamond engagement ring along with a passionate love letter addressed to someone named Gertrude, a woman she later learns is a high-society habitu\u00e9. With sparkle, verve, and a fine eye for the details of the mid-1960s, author Healy follows Billie through darkening twists of fate that begin after she meets a man named Avery Webster. Scion of an old money Eastport family, Avery offers Billie glimpses into a glittering world of garden parties, yachts, and secrets that culminate in the brutal stabbing death of Gertrude Taylor. Unable to resist Avery or the mystery surrounding Gertrude and her murder, Billie begins her own private investigation. What she learns along the way\u2014not just about the skeletons littering the closets of Eastport\u2019s wealthiest citizens but also about her own less-than-decorous desires\u2014transforms Billie\u2019s humdrum, nowhere-going-fast life into one that is anything but ordinary. Replete with Emily Post\u2013style epigraphs about etiquette, this hybrid mystery\/romance hearkens back to Austen\u2019s novels of refined drawing room intrigue while revealing, beneath smiles and witty banter, the underside of human nature.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Small town girl Billie McCadie has big dreams. A cultural linguist and Jane Austen fan with fantasies of working in a museum, marrying a \u201cdreamy archeologist,\u201d and living a life of \u201cnerdy splendor,\u201d Billie works as a seamstress in her hometown of Eastport, Maine. Everything changes the day she receives an envelope in her post […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":3430,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3429","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3429"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3429"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3429\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/3430"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3429"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3429"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3429"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}