Back then, tuberculosis was a killer, a highly contagious disease with a low survival rate. In 1925, Chester Dare, Miss Penny’s father, built Cliffside as a sanatorium for TB patients. Written in Miss Penny’s hand, Eleanor is told she has a mystery to solve adding, “My nightmare is over. Later that evening, Eleanor finds another note within her bed covers. The two died in an automobile accident 20 years ago. A suicide note, clutched in Miss Penny’s hand, explains that she’s lonely and wants to join her father and sister, Chamomile. Even before Eleanor can settle in, Miss Penny is found dead, an apparent suicide, her face garishly painted to resemble a grotesque doll. Miss Penny is there to greet her, but their time together will be brief. While Eleanor is excited about beginning a new chapter in her life, she can’t shake the feeling of dread that overtakes her upon glimpsing the foreboding mansion through the fog.“Something wicked was indeed wending its way into my life, only I was too caught up in my circumstances to notice,” she observes. Almost too easily, “Miss Penny” makes an offer that Eleanor finds hard to refuse. Eleanor feels herself drawn to Cliffside, located on the shores of Lake Superior.

Cliffside Manor, a respected retreat for artists and writers, needs someone to replace its longtime director, Penelope Dare. As luck would have it, the perfect opportunity lands at her doorstep. Although her experience would land her a position at another newspaper, she wants to make a complete change.

Diagnosed with PTSD, she is forced to leave her job.

She lives in Minneapolis with her part-time dog, Zeus, and is at work on her next novel.After years of covering crime for a newspaper, Eleanor Harper suffers the cumulative effect of seeing so much violence and horror. Her second and third novels, The Fate of Mercy Alban and The Vanishing, established her as a leading suspense novelist, who reviewers are calling the Queen of the Northern Gothic. When it won the 2011 Minnesota Book Award for genre fiction, she started writing fiction full-time.

After two decades as a journalist, writing for varied publications including USA Today, the Huffington Post, the Star Tribune, Midwest Living, and others, Wendy wrote her first novel, The Tale of Halcyon Crane. Wendy Webb knew from the minute she read A Wrinkle in Time at age eleven that she was destined to be a writer.

The end of temperance dare a novel