Pageant of the Mortals

by Hal Toliver, Mary Tolliver

The widow of a photographer, Bea Ellis is familiar with artful deception. She is nonetheless caught off guard by the discrepancy between apparent innocence and malice in the friend sitting next to her at an art colony’s Pageant of the Masters. Or is the reality neither malicious nor innocent but something more complex? What if character is not definable but instead a series of masks presented to the faces that they meet? What if truth itself is a receding image caught between opposing mirrors? Still, this was a murder. Despite his extravagant last-minute movements, Jesse Volcek, a ruthless Orange County builder, was not acting when he collapsed from poisoning in the restaurant of a swank Newport Center hotel.

228 pages, Paperback

First published May 14, 2007