Dead of Summer

New York resident, coffee fanatic and television writer Michael Carpo escapes to the small town of Bridgewater, Conn., once a year for a week at the house of a friend, elderly African-American writer Jack Crawford. This year, Carpo's vacation plan takes a detour when he finds Jack dead. In this third Carpo caper (after The Street Where She Lived), Miano agreeably picks up the pace from the earlier, somewhat lackadaisical, entries. Jack's demise looks a lot like suicide, but a trip to the local library reveals that the older residents of the sleepy burg are dying at a suspiciously fast clip. The deceased, it turns out, are all linked to a ghost town submerged by a recently constructed lake. Carpo must find out who wanted them dead, and why, before the last of the lost town's survivors disappear. He is distracted from his detecting, however, by Amanda Cutler, a local painter whose artwork comes eerily close to duplicating his own bad dreams. An evocative subtext exploring the emotional fallout from deaths that haunt the living will help keep readers turning pages in this tightly woven mystery, the best yet of the series. (Apr.)