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Lynne Montgomery, young for a widow (52) owns a travel agency specializing in tours for senior citizens. This time, she comes from California to New Hampshire, site of her roots, with a twofold motive; she wants to scout locations for next year's tour of the fall foliage,and she wants to get to the bottom of her 82-year-old mother's crazy scheme to open a bed and breakfast in a house she's recently purchased. In preparation for rehabbing the house, mother Priscilla is replacing the plumbing, which involves digging up the cement floor in the basement. During the process, two bodies are unearthed and are soon identified as Sydney Ann Shackleford, a wealthy young heiress who was an active protester during the Vietnam War and Eldon Weibeck, a young man eligible for the draft and on his way out of the country. Priscilla's house is later identified as a place where Vietnam war resisters were housed on their way to Canada or to a place where they could assume another identity. Lynne, her daughter Jenna, and Priscilla take off on an odyssey through New England, partly in quest for the murderer of the two young people, partly in a quest for sights Lynne's group may want to see next year, and partly in a quest for the elusive Will Colwhistle, a shady financial planner to whom Priscilla has entrusted her life savings in the hope of making a killing to pay for the extensive repairs needed to bring the b&b up to snuff. In their inquiries, they find that Mr Colwhistle's four offices are mail drops and that no one who works in his alleged offices has ever seen him. The search for the murderer takes a back seat to the descriptions of New England. However, the research on the area is spotty. Lynne dismisses Salem because of the witch kitsch, which is, admittedly, dreadful, but she passes on the city's glorious Federal period houses open to the public, on the House of the Seven Gables, and on the National Maritime Historic Park, which features the Customs House where Nathaniel Hawthorne worked, as well as the home of America's first millionaire. She doesn't go to the Edith Wharton house, fearing that it will be like Mark Twain's home, dark and full of heavy Victorian furniture. Had she gone to Wharton's home, she would have found it bright and airy, with floor-to-ceiling windows in several rooms. The plot is serviceable with unfortunate pauses in the action to explain the niceties of hunting whales and of making cider. The scene-stealers are the two sisters, Priscilla and Abigail, who personify the image of New England women of a certain generation -- crusty, sometimes cantankerous, and always stubborn.
Reviewed by Mary Elizabeth Devine, May 2004
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