[Mark Manning Mystery 03] • Body Language

The holidays are approaching, but *Chicago Journal* reporter Mark Manning is anything but joyous. His career at the *Journal* has maxed out and guilt over the death of a colleague has taken its toll. Not even Mark's lover of three years, handsome architect Neil Waite, can pull Mark out of his midlife slump. What he needs is a major life change. It's waiting for him in his sleepy hometown of Dumont, Wisconsin, where he's made plans to take over the local paper, purchase the rambling old home where he visited as a child, and reacquaint himself with his cousin Suzanne and her teenage son, Thad. But as he soon discovers, the promise of a new beginning is shaded in something sinister.

Just days before Christmas, Mark discovers Suzanne lying in a pool of her own blood, felled by a blow to the head...a single cryptic message on her lips. It is that dying word that leads Mark into the darkest recesses of Suzanne's life, and the even darker regions of his own past, where the most dangerous of secrets are buried deep in a bitter, and deadly, family plot.