House of Evil — Miriam Lynch

Jessica had been invited by Stan Gardiner to spend the week-end at Stoneledge, the Gardiner estate, and since she would arrive at night, and might have difficulty in locating the house, Stan suggested that she spend the night at an inn in a nearby town.

During the night in the almost-deserted inn, Jessica was awakened by an intruder bent over her suitcase, an intruder who fled even as she awoke. Dazed and frightened, and in a strange place, Jessica waited until daylight to find what, if anything, had been taken from her suitcase. And then she found that nothing at all had been taken, but something had been left -- a nickel-plated revolver and a bunch of keys.

On the way to the police station to report her find, Jessica passed a house across from the Common that seemed familiar to her. It looked unwelcoming, even grim, but Jessica knew that somehow this house had figured in her life. Perhaps here she could find the help she needed…

Such was Jessica's introduction to a New England house which she had visited as a child -- the home of a classmate friend of her mother's, whose one passion, Jessica now remembered, had been the cultivation of red roses in her conservatory. Everywhere in the house had been roses -- big, dark, red roses.

From her first glimpse of the forbidding looking housekeeper to her meeting with Michael Young, Edith Randall's nephew with whom Jessica had played as a child, everything seemed unreal to Jessica. She was caught in a web of evil, a web in which this home was the heart…

Hero: Michael (Mike) Young
Heroine: Jessica Wellman