A review by slferg
Deadly Summer Nights by Vicki Delany

4.0

Elizabeth Grady is managing Haggerman's Catskills Resort for her mother, an actress/dancer who inherited the resort from an admirer. The resort, was admittedly, rather rundown, but they needed it since her mother's last husband had emptied her bank accounts and run off with all her money. So, Elizabeth is trying to make the resort a popular, paying concern. She has recruited her best friend and her aunt, Tatiana, to help her make a go of it, along with some other friends. Elizabeth has had some trouble with a few of the other resort owners who didn't figure a "girl" should be able to manage a resort. But she really runs into trouble when a quiet writer in one of the remote cabins is killed. She calls his contact, a nephew who works for a newspaper. Then the sheriff discovers a book and leaps to the conclusion that the writer was a communist who ran a ring of spies, etc. The writer is actually a fiction author and the book was research, as were the maps pinned to the wall in his cabin. But the sheriff calls the FBI to report it. He doesn't really seem concerned with finding the killer, more interested in undermining the resort and Elizabeth and throwing his weight around. But Elizabeth and her friends, relations and employees help her try to track down why he was killed and who did it. Including a hint from a comedian she had hired.