Product Overview
Stillton Academy, a small art college on the New England coast north of Boston, is in financial trouble, and its days are numbered unless someone provides extraordinary help. The final straw may be the sudden disappearance of an instructor with a female student, daughter of the Academys only significant donor. Fred Taylor, called in to trouble-shoot, goes undercover as a member of the faculty and shortly finds himself enmeshed in the conflicting motives and designs of faculty and students, as well as those of a board of trustees whose interest in the long-term survival of the operation seems lazy, misguided or perhaps a good deal more sinister. Meanwhile, as the town of Stillton, Massachusetts, is visited by murder, the motives of Freds employer, the collector Clayton Reed, remain obscure. What is there in the town, or at the college, that whets his acute acquisitive instincts? He will not say, beyond his hermetic instructions, Trust no one. Look at everything. And everyone. Freds assignment takes him to the Life Room, where his students sometimes moonlight as life models. Are his temporary colleagues on the faculty eccentrics or just artists? Clayton Reed collects art. Thats what he lives for. In sleepy Stillton, a town ripe for development, though suspiciously backward and unexploited, what hidden treasure is Clayton hoping for? And can Fred find it before the college goes up in flames?
