After traveling to Guatemala with a small group led by an anthropologist, I started work on Place of the Altars, a literary mystery now under revision. It shows how secrets from the past infiltrate the present with brutal consequences.

​

In Place of the Altars, when an American artist travels to Guatemala to investigate her twin brother’s death, she unravels clues to a tragedy whose dark cloud has hovered over her family since her birth.

 

Fifty-year-old Laure Forsythe believes that her twin brother’s death is not an accident, all the more because Paul had never gone off to a place like Guatemala without letting her know. Laure makes the trip to Guatemala with her beloved Mayan godfather who has always told her stories from Mayan mythology. But once in the land of the Maya, he insists that she stay away from Momostenango, the village nearest to the chasm where Paul reportedly fell to his death. As she becomes embroiled in a personal quest to find out what really happened and why, Laure unwittingly puts those dearest to her in danger.

​

Read Excerpt