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Publisher: She Writes Press (2019)

 

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Some dreams delight. Some terrify. Celeste’s dream haunts her in Susan Z. Ritz’s supernatural mystery, A Dream to Die For

Celeste wonders why she would dream of a woman in danger. After all, it seems like someone else’s dream. As Celeste reflects on what she remembers, indistinct features begin to focus, revealing details. Celeste’s concerns for the unknown woman grow. 

That dream, so tangible in the moment, refuses to leave her. How could it, with the woman in imminent danger? Celeste doesn’t realize that this dream will put her in peril. Can she find the answers she needs before a killer switches his target? Can Celeste and the unknown woman be saved?

Celeste rushes to the office of Larry–her therapist and Riverton’s acknowledged cult leader. 

Despite her fiancé’s demands that she stop seeing Larry, Celeste hopes she’ll find the support and help she needs at his office. Instead, Larry convinces her to break up with her future husband. As for her beautiful engagement ring, well, that, of course, goes to Larry. 

But when she describes the troubling dream to him, Larry trembles in fear, or was that fury? He throws her out of his practice. Later, Celeste returns to find Larry dead, murdered. The police are looking at Celeste as their primary suspect. Someone else’s dream becomes her nightmare.

In immediate need of a savvy defense attorney, Celeste pleads for help from an old friend.

 Together the accused and her lawyer begin a fantastic, desperate, and risky investigation to find Larry’s killer. That strange dream, and the woman in it, become a surprising key to proving Celeste’s innocence. 

Through their analysis of clues and suspects, they plunge into the depths of Larry’s cult, now in disarray. Both cult followers and doubters reveal many surprises. These two groups struggle against each other, but they may need to find a way to cooperate to expose the events that led up to Larry’s murder – and who did it.

A chilling mystery, author Susan Z. Ritz has filled her book with intrigue and subtle clues.

A variety of suspects hide the most compelling motives. Which of these Riverton characters, including Celeste’s intended, killed Larry? Can Celeste trust the guy, despite his questionable actions? This investigation puts her love for him to an extreme test. Can she live with him? Will she live without him? Should she fear him? 

Ritz weaves a clever plot, set in a plausible contemporary social issue of a cult that demands complete loyalty and dominates every aspect of its followers’ lives. 

How could Celeste prove her innocence and name the one who killed the cult leader? Celeste and others struggle to break the cult’s puzzling and psychological hold on them and learn to live free of it. Will the truth of the murder and the cult be discovered? Can Celeste save the woman in her dream? Will she find the killer before another person succumbs to A Dream To Die For?

A Dream to Die For by Susan Z. Ritz won First Place in the 2019 CIBA Mystery and Mayhem Book Awards for Cozy and Not-So-Cozy Mysteries.

 

5 Stars! Best Book Chanticleer Book Reviews

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