The Alpine Gamble

THE ALPINE ADVOCATE IS ON A ROLL.
The big story is the five million dollar luxury spa that Los Angeles real estate developers want to build around Alpine's mountainside mineral springs--hot news and fierce controversy for Advocate readers, and for the paper's editor and publisher, Emma Lord.
Pro-spa Alpiners cite the prospect of sorely needed new jobs. Those against it predict glitz, sleaze, and an avalanche of "Californicators." No one foresees the murder that shocks the town. Aided by her House & Home editor, Vida Runkel, and tongue-tied Sheriff Milo Dodge, Emma lines up her biggest, blackest headlines and goes hunting--for a brilliant killer and the strange story behind an almost perfect crime. . . .
READ ALL ABOUT IT!

Mary Richardson Daheim started spinning stories before she could spell. Daheim has been a journalist, an editor, a public relations consultant, and a freelance writer, but fiction was always her medium of choice. In 1982, she launched a career that is now distinguished by more than sixty novels. In 2000, she won the Literary Achievement Award from the Pacific Northwest Writers Association. In October 2008, she was inducted into the University of Washington’s Communication Alumni Hall of Fame. Daheim lives in her hometown of Seattle and is a direct descendant of former residents of the real Alpine, which existed as a logging town from 1910 to 1929, when it was abandoned after the mill was closed. The Alpine/Emma Lord series has created interest in the site, which was named a Washington State ghost town in July 2011. An organization called the Alpine Advocates has been formed to preserve what remains of the town as a historic site.