Giants in the Wings — Louise Bergstrom

Trudging along a deserted roadway in the pouring rain, brown-eyed Brandon St. John wondered ruefully is she had taken leave of her senses in deciding to travel to the wild moors of Gotland to pay a surprise visit to Magna Lind. Magna, a dainty-featured Swedish blonde, had lived with Brandon's family in Virginia during her year as a high-school foreign-exchange student. Six years had passed since Magna had returned to her home of the windswept island in the Baltic Sea, and Brandon had pounced on the opportunity to take a side trip to Gotland after touring Sweden with her aunt.

As Brandon approached the estate of Raukelid, named for the giant-like gray stone called RAUKAR and home to the Lind family, her doubts weighed heavy. Magna's recent letters had been disturbingly terse, as unfathomable as her lifelong devotion to her distant cousin, Rolf Eklund, the darkly enigmatic painter who lived alone in the twelfth-century manor house on the estate. Brandon knew only that Rolf had precipitously decided to marry a girl her scarcely knew, who shortly afterward met an untimely death. Magna, seemingly haunted by a sinister force, was attempting to win Rolf back.

It seemed to Brandon that an unhappy spell lay over the crumbling gray masonry of Raukelid. As her stay there was destined to reveal, she was more correct than she knew.