Quiet Evil

Tarot cards, a trapeze artist who doesn't age, and a magician who really can disappear... In the fifth Promise McNeal mystery, set in the Western North Carolina Mountains, Promise's psychic abilities prickle when Little People of America's past president, Dick Jest, stocks up on Cuban cigars and drives his Winnebago from Florida to build an academy for circus performers on the site of an abandoned amusement park. When the magician's assistant is murdered in a dilapidated tram car, the dramatic, Czech trapeze artist, Ruta, draws Promise into the mystery with a strange Tarot Card deck---which she insists she's held for Promise since 1939---and a bizarre story of the magician Reznik and the Old Towne Clock in Prague. Promise's husband, Perry County Sheriff Daniel Allen, is determined to go with the facts of the case, but when they meet the other members of Jest's circus family, Daniel realizes no one is who they seem, and the facts are masked in past violence and lies. Though, as the murder goes unsolved, Promise is haunted by nightmares and struggles with an elusive illness, she and Daniel are determined to bring the murderer to justice. Fact by fact, they narrow the field of suspects until another death at the academy forces them to reconsider Ruta's wild stories and think like the killer, if they are to catch him before he disappears for good.