Peregrine's Rest,Used

From Booklist Hesper Dance is the caretaker and archivist of Peregrine's Rest, a small, privately owned cemetery that has been designated as a potential historic site. Hesper has taken this job because she wants to see a ghost, to be reassured that life has meaning beyond our short, unhappy time on earth. To her pleasant solitude is added Quentin Pike, a traveler who is seeking land untouched by humanity but who needs a job and is hired to help Hesper complete her cataloging of the graves. The final key character is Lydia Webkin. Lydia collects the comic books created by her longdead sweetheart, who, not coincidentally, is buried in Peregrine's Rest. Together, Hesper, Quentin, and Lydia aid each other in their quests and foil a plot to desecrate the old cemetery. This is the sort of find that reviewers crave: a terrific book by a first novelist writing for a small press. Wonderfully drawn scenes, imaginative characters, and a wellcrafted plot, complete with a logical and satisfying resolution. George Needham Product Description The historic cemetery Peregrine's Rest offers a sense of sanctuary and peace to caretaker Hesper Dance that is threatened when secrets from the past rise from the grave From Publishers Weekly Despite some ghoulish fun and literate prose, Gostin's first novel, set on and around Halloween in an old Maryland cemetery, walks cardboard eccentrics through a creaky plot. Hesper Dance, livein caretaker of Peregrine's Rest, a graveyard founded in 1848, is a manicdepressive, introverted exlibrarian who seeks refuge from life's disappointments by communing with the dead. Her lifelong ambition is to see a ghost. Inadvertently aiding her in this quest is her new assistant, Quentin Pike, world traveler, adventurer, mapmaker, and Lydia Webkin, a septuagenarian comicbook collector. Ghostly doings will ultimately unite Hesper and Quentin in romantic love, while Lydia, haunted by the spirit of a dead cartoonist with whom she had an affair 40 years ago, attracts evil in the person of twins Argus and Audrey Malvin, a deadly brotherandsister team prone to graverobbing, counterfeiting and malice. This offbeat entertainment is full of comicbook and cemetery lore, and Gostin spikes the spooky intrigue with deft approaches to the question of whether we are bound to our bodies or whether something survives Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Kirkus Reviews Light, engaging, smalltownromance debut novel, with a goofy whodunit subplot about a trio of eccentrics obsessed with old graveyards. Hesper Dance, the fortysomething heroine, has always found graveyards peacefuland so she becomes caretaker of Peregrine's Rest, a shady, historic cemetery park in the small Maryland town of Colonnade. On the opposite side of town, Quentin Pike, a rootless, fortysomething loner who reminds women of an old European walled city that had seen uprisings and overthrowings, bombs and reconstruction, glory and disillusion'' loses his umpteenth job, answers a classified ad for a job as a caretaker's assistant at the cemetery and is hired over Hesper's objections. Meanwhile, Lydia Webkin, a retiree who lives in an old house that shares a wall with the cemetery, searches the bucolic Maryland landscape for dealers in old comic books drawn by a dead lover, Ned Holly, whose cartooned gravestone is one of the cemetery's more popular tourist attractions. Each comic book Lydia finds helps her to commune with Ned's spirit, whose actuality Gostin tastefully leaves ambiguous. The novel harbors many an unusual turn and wry glimpse of human nature as these three become ensnared in the vile plans of 60year old twins Argus and Audrey Malvin, the cartoonishly perverse black sheep of one of the town's wealthiest families, who want to close down the cemetery because of a nasty secret hidden within a crypt. The hokeyness of the twins' evil undermines a lovely, coy tale of older, but no wiser, folks discov