Robert French

The Diary of Nellie Mill Robert French

What could four members of the New York Mob and a nineteenth-century London debutante have in common? Absolutely nothing, except a ghost. Stuck in a semirural suburb on the west coast because some "business" has to be straightened out, the bored men have nothing better to do than engage in confrontations with neighbours and visit a haunted mansion on the anniversary of the ghost's appearance, an event that always draws a crowd. According to legend, the fashionable beautiful Nellie Mill jumped to her death one night in 1888 because of her tyrannical father, who brought her out to a small rural community to isolate her and then kept her from the man she met there and grew to love. One of the mobsters finds her diary, hidden in the mansion. In it she describes her father's slow descent into insanity. She begins to find out how he destroyed her mother. And she discovers that the man she has begun to love has become part of her father's plan to destroy her. Trapped in the mansion, she has to find a way out. As you come to know her, you realize that the last thing Nellie Mill would do is jump off a cliff. What about the ghost? Legends have a way of inventing themselves. So who haunts the mansion? I think I know. And my guess is as good as anyone else's.