Poison To Purge Melancholy

by Elena Santangelo

Pat Montella should have loved the idea of spending Christmas with her boyfriend Hugh Lee in a romantic place like Colonial Williamsburg. But the trip also means meeting Hugh's mother and his siblings, and his moody teenaged daughter will be tagging along. On the bright side, Miss Maggie, Pat's best friend and surrogate grandmother, will be coming, too, and she knows all the words to every holiday song ever written. Still, Pat hasn't been feeling...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1518803555
• ISBN13: 9781518803550
• Release Date: August 2006
• Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
• Length: 352 Pages
• Weight: 0.90 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

A series that grows in the telling

I've read all the Pat Montella mysteries, and they just keep getting better. "Poison" is a terrific read...carefully researched, tightly written, and with characters you care about in spite of their flaws. Santangelo's settings are so real, so vivid, they made me yearn for Christmas in August.

Deadly Holidays

Pat Montella arrives in Colonial Williamsburg escorting a sullen teenager, her future step-daughter. Beth Ann's father Hugh Lee and Miss Maggie Shelby will arrive later in the day so Pat must face her prospective mother-in-law on her own. Pat has made a promise to Hugh of no more ghosts, but the spirit world will not allow her to keep her pledge. Elena Santangelo has the skill to move the reader back and forth from current time to the 18th century without a feeling of disruption. Ghosts of Christmas past collide with murder in current time in a house filled with doctors who have constant battle of one upmanship. Pat is drawn against her will back to the past and an ancient murder while the family consumes a feast of colonial abundance. Miss Maggie devours the food and the clues while enlightening the reader on early Virginia history, which makes for an unexpected, but satisfying conclusion. This is an excellent series for all the right seasons. It has ghosts, murder, romance and mystery. Writing as a Small BusinessSins of the Fathers: A Brewster County NovelNatchez Above The River: A Family's Survival In The Civil WarUnder the Liberty OakGuns Across the Rio: A Texas Ranger in Old Mexico

Another intriguing historical paranormal mystery

What could be worse than arriving at your future in-laws at Christmastime without your boyfriend, and with his sullen teenage daughter? How about having your gynecologist show up for the family celebration? How about feeling the presence of ghosts in a colonial house in Williamsburg? Elena Santangelo brings back Pat Montella in this fascinating mystery. Pat has communicated with ghosts before, linking murders from the past with current events. This time, she promised her boyfriend she will have nothing further to do with ghosts. Then she feels fear when she is in the old parts of Gladys Lee's colonial home, and even feels the affects of poisoning. In a parallel storyline, a music master in Williamsburg in 1783 witnesses the illness and subsequent death of a lodger in the Carson house, the house that Gladys Lee lives in two hundred years later. Santangelo does a wonderful job in combining romance, history, mystery and the paranormal while writing two storylines, one set in colonial Williamsburg, one two centuries later. Pat Montella and her mentor, Miss Maggie Shelby, are fascinating, well-rounded characters who are intelligent enough to make the link between events that occur so far apart. Highly recommended for lovers of American history and historical mystery.