Book 3

Shadows on the Ivy

by Lea Wait

Published 3 August 2004
Maggie Summer has three loves: her antique print business, Shadows; her career as a community college professor in Somerset County, New Jersey; and the new man in her life, Will Brewer. Her biological clock is pushing her to decide whether she's ready to add a fourth love: an adopted child.
Although Will is on the road just now, Maggie's life is full. She uses prints by Currier & Ives, Thomas Nast, and William Ludwell Sheppard to illustrate her lectures on American cultural history, and Oliver and Dorothy Whitcomb, a wealthy couple who are on the college board, are two of her best customers.
When the Whitcombs design and dedicate a special dormitory for single parents and their children, Maggie is thrilled to become the faculty adviser to the young parents. Her new assignment gives her plenty of time to think about what single parenthood would mean for her. Plenty of time -- until one of the young mothers is poisoned, and the web of danger at the dorm threatens to encircle Maggie.
There is a killer on campus. Is it an outsider or someone Maggie knows and trusts? Does someone want to destroy Whitcomb House or the college? And is Maggie in as much danger as her students?
As always, Maggie finds the answers to her questions in the antique prints she knows and loves. And this time, torn between her own needs and those of her students, the most important discoveries Maggie makes are about herself.
Rich with appealing characters and fascinating insiders' lore about antique prints, Shadows on the Ivy is the best yet in this award-nominated series from an author who brilliantly brings together her knowledge of prints and her love of storytelling.

Shadows on the Coast of Maine

by Lea Wait

Published 22 July 2003
"Maine. Antiques. August." That's all Maggie Summer requires for a guaranteed fun getaway. But there is an unexplained urgency behind the invitation from her former college roommate, Amy Douglas. The eighteenth-century house Amy and her husband Drew are restoring in tiny Madoc, Maine, is perfect -- or it will be, once Maggie supplies just the right antique prints. But Amy's type A personality is bordering on hysteria: could her desperation to get pregnant explain the sound of the crying infant that haunts her nights? Perhaps the hostile neighbors -- resentful of transplanted New Yorkers Amy and Drew -- have Amy on edge. But when the body of a missing teenaged girl turns up on their land, Maggie knows the threat is authentic. Now everyone, even Maggie's antiques-hunter friend Will Brewer, is cast in a suspicious light -- as she scratches beneath the surface of small-town New England life, and blows the dust off secrets hidden inside a grand Maine home for generations.