title: Journal: The Short Life and Mysterious Death of Amy Zoe Mason
author: Joyce Atkinson
description: This tantalizing "found" journal of a troubled young wife and mother combines the diary of Amy Mason, correspondence, clippings from newspaper accounts and remnants of the 19th-century novel Amy used instead of a blank notebook to frame the story of her disintegrating marriage. Amy's husband, Robert, moves to Boston to head a new cardiology institute, but Amy and her two small children remain behind in Houston, planning to follow later. As the relocation process drags on, Robert throws himself into his new responsibilities and Amy fights a deepening depression. She finds a new friend in her Houston real estate agent, Vanessa Garamond, but the beautiful Vanessa provokes Amy's suspicions with an unannounced trip to Boston. Sisters Kristine and Joyce Atkinson only hint at the occurrence of a crime, and readers will have to draw their own conclusions from the open-ended assemblage of visual and textual clues. Traditional mystery readers may want a more definitive story, but amateur scrapbookers will find inspiration in this collage. <br />Copyright  Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
zlib_text: 
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  DEADLY AFFAIRS
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Brenda Joyce
  
  St. Martin's Paperbacks
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ONE
  
  Thursday, February 6, 1902—9:00 A.M.
  
  "What do you think of this one, Miss Cahill?"
  
  Francesca Cahill stood as patiently as possible, no easy task. She glanced
  down at the shimmering piece of apricot-hued silk fabric that Maggie Kennedy
  was holding up. "Why, that one is just as lovely as the others," she said. Was
  it already nine o'clock? Had her father noticed that one of his morning papers
  was missing? Vanished, as it were? And would they ever be finished with this
  fitting? Francesca had two classes to attend uptown at Barnard College, a very
  exclusive institution dedicated to the higher education of women, in which she
  had secretly enrolled— and, thus far, not been found out by her mother, who
  abhorred the thought of her younger daughter ever being labeled a
  bluestocking.
  
  For being an intellectual—and a Reformer with a capital R—could only interfere
  with Julia Van Wyck Cahill's plans to succ