**From the jacket** Phyllis A. Whitney spins a chilling tale of Lauren Castle's search for the truth behind her husband's accidental death and her famous grandmother's suicide. Two generations divide these tragic events, yet both seem curiously and inextricably linked. In 1938, two of Hollywood's most glittering young stars, Victoria Frazer and Roger Brandt, were cast in a movie set in these mountains. Drawn to each other with a passion that was destined to cool, their ill-fated affair ended with the birth of an illegitimate daughter, Victoria's death, and the end of Roger's career. Ostracized by the movie industry, judged morally corrupt by his fans, Roger Brandt stayed on in North Carolina, but still the scandal became the stuff of Hollywood legend. Many years later, Lauren Castle is drawn into Brandt's orbit by a more recent tragedy: the death of her filmmaker husband. Only Lauren knows that she is the daughter of Roger and Victoria's love child. As she begins to make sense of what happened to her husband and what happened in her family's past, she risks exposing herself to an evil that reaches with undiminished virulence across two generations.