A Death at Eastwick

Book 1: The Eastwick Mansion Mysteries

by L.C. Warman

Genres: Gothic; Mystery; Traditional Mysteries

Synopsis

When John Eastwick Jr.’s father dies, he finds out about one family secret that will change his life forever. But a murder the night of the memorial service raises the question—what else was his beloved father hiding? 

***

21-year-old John Eastwick Jr. has lived a charmed and cozy life. The sole heir of the Eastwick family fortune, John is on the cusp of graduating from the renowned Montvale University out east before returning home to run his family business. But in late fall of his final year, John’s father dies of heart failure. Days later, his father is named as one of the disgraced moguls who bribed John’s way into his prestigious college.

Kicked out of school, John returns home to his distraught mother at their lakeside mansion to bury his father. There, John’s world continues to crumble beneath his feet: the will that the family lawyer reads bears no resemblance to the last version that the late John Eastwick Sr. created. In fact, John Eastwick Sr. has divided his estate not only between his son and wife, but the family chef, their loyal lawyer, his young secretary, and his estranged brother. 

John wonders, is his father trying to atone for past mistakes--and what other secrets might he be keeping? 

But that night, after the reading of the will, one among the group is murdered. And John Eastwick Jr. must not only piece together who the threat is, but also face what else his beloved father might have been hiding.

A DEATH AT EASTWICK is the first novel in the mystery trilogy “The Eastwick Mansion Mysteries.” Each novel in the trilogy is a complete standalone, featuring a different story taking place in the Eastwick mansion in St. Clair. The complete trilogy includes:

• A DEATH AT EASTWICK (Book 1)
• A SCANDAL AT EASTWICK (Book 2)
• A BETRAYAL AT EASTWICK (Book 3)

Release date: September 17, 2019

Publisher: Greenleaf & Plympton

Print pages: 227

Sample

John Eastwick Sr. died before the scandal hit.

 

His son, John Eastwick Jr., first heard the news of his father’s death on a Tuesday morning. He was sitting in the light-filled undergraduate library at Montvale, watching a group of bright-eyed tourists snapping photos of one of the prestigious college’s ivy-strewn yards, when his mother called.

 

“You have to come home,” were her first words.

 

His father, she explained, had died in his bathtub. An aneurysm, or heart attack, or something catastrophic and quick. By the time Mrs. Eastwick had checked on him, it was too late.

 

It was a few hours’ plane ride from Montvale’s east-coast, seaside campus to the wooded, lakeside town of St. Clair. John Jr. spent most of it in a stupor, holding his history course book in front of him with a green highlighter in one hand, highlighting everything because his mind could focus on nothing. Death. It felt like a bad joke.

 

John spent the next week in a zombie-like trance, next to his weeping mother, sorting through condolence cards, calling back lawyers and business associates, and making what seemed like insane decisions about caskets and flowers and suits until his father had been buried in the family plot in the St. Clair cemetery, and the only remaining John Eastwick returned with his mother to their family estate.

 

The speed of it all had shocked John, who had never buried a close family member in his twenty-one years of life. His grandparents had passed away before he was born or when he was too young to remember, and the small size of the rest of his family meant that he had been one semester away from becoming a college graduate with no real experience of death or grief.

 

Indeed, John had had a blessed life before his father’s sudden death: he was, beyond all measure, rich, and besides that good-looking, athletic enough to play two varsity sports in high school (one of them well), and above six feet. He had taken prestigious internship after prestigious internship at various financial firms during the summers in between college, and had spent his winters with his family skiing in the Swiss Alps or, when his mother wanted something “easier and less of a fuss,” in Aspen.

 

Perhaps due to the influence of his parents, who stressed hard work, honesty, and integrity, John did not grow up into the monster one might expect with so many advantages. He was made to feel keenly how lucky he was and to work to deserve (impossible as it was) such an unequal portion in life. He was, naturally, a little spoiled, but he was unfailingly polite, acceptably modest, and rigidly scrupulous.

 

But tragedy rarely strikes in isolation. And two days before John’s uncle, aunt, and cousin arrived for the reading of his father’s will, the scandal broke.

 

And John Eastwick Sr. was plastered across every newspaper and social media feed in the nation.