Meet a Dark Stranger — Lee Belvedere

Lewis Benyard was the last man in the world with whom pretty young Chance Brooks should have fallen in love. Virtually everyone in the small New Zealand town where Chance lived voiced dark suspicions about this handsome mining engineer from faraway America, and Chance's own father angrily forbade her to see him.

Why had Lewis come from across the seas to throw the peaceful community into turmoil? What did he hope to find here? And did his plans mean good or evil for the town? Chance Brooks was a newspaper reporter as well as a woman, and amid deepening mystery and mounting violence, she set out to unearth the truth about this dangerously attractive stranger, and find the answer to her own yearning.


Life in Marlington was not exactly dull, but it was certainly not what Chance Brooks considered terribly exciting. Her life revolved around making a home for her father, visiting with her Aunt Clara, working as a reporter for the Marlington Trumpet and occasionally dating one or two of the local eligible males -- none of which really stirred her romantic, twenty-two-year-old heart.

Chance's Aunt Clara was more optimistic about the future, however, and insisted that one day a tall, dark man would enter Chance's life and alter it considerably. This information she gleaned through her numerous tea-leaf readings, and although Chance was amused by this means of seeing into the future, she did not for one moment believe in it. Until it happened.

A rumor had been going around that an American mining engineer had come to Marlington to explore, for his firm, the possibilities of reopening the Marlington Goldfield, where one the prospects of profitable gold mining had been very favorable. In reality, all that the small New Zealand town had gained was hardships and disillusion, for little of worth had been accomplished.

So it is with bot trepidation and curiosity that Chance sets out to interview Lewis Benyard for the Trumpet -- for it the rumor is true, she knows that Marlington's reaction will be swift and furious opposition.

Hero: Lewis Benyard
Heroine: Chance Brooks