Middle-aged Mira Fenn knows she has an uncomfortably exotic past. As a small girl, she lived in a ornate old house in tiny Las Vegas, New Mexico, tended by oddly silent servant women and ruled by her coldly flamboyant mother Colette. When Mira was nine, Colette went on one of her unexplained trips, only this time she never returned.

Placed with foster parents, Mira was raised in Ohio, normal save for her passion for color. On gaining adulthood, she learned that she still owned the New Mexico house. She also learned that, as a condition of being allowed to adopt her, Mira's foster parents had agreed to change their name, move to another state, and never ask why.

Years later, going through family papers after the deaths of her elderly foster parents, Mira finds documents that pique her curiosity about her vanished mother and the reasons behind her strange childhood and adoption.

Travelling back to New Mexico, she finds the house is and isn't as she remembers it. Inside, it's much the same. Outside, it's been painted in innumerable colors. As Mira continues to investigate her mother's life, events take stranger and stranger turns. The silent women reappear. Even as Mira begins to suspect the power to which she may be heir, the house itself appears to be waking up...

Shot through with magic and the atmosphere of the Southwest, this singular fantasy novel has all the storytelling vigor of Jane Lindskold's very popular Firekeeper series.

At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

**

From Publishers Weekly

When middle-aged spinster Mira Fenn returns to her birthplace, Las Vegas, N.Mex., to try to find out what happened to her mother, Colette, who disappeared from their mirror-filled house without a trace years earlier, she finds a town full of ghosts and contradictions. Domingo, the hereditary caretaker of Mira's ancestral home, tells her that the house has been asking him to paint it in new and brilliant colors. As Mira and Domingo explore the house's awakening intelligence, their intricately entwined family histories and their own growing relationship, they find out more about color magic, Colette and Mira herself than they might have wanted to know. Conferring magical life on ordinary objects and people with a sweet flair reminiscent of Charles De Lint and Pamela Dean, Lindskold (Through Wolf's Eyes, etc.) spins a lovely and original yarn that ends up sadly tangled with unresolved questions; though billed as a stand-alone work, the novel contains a sequel's worth of untied loose ends. Mira phlegmatically declares that having more questions than answers is "fine with me," and anyone who agrees will find this an extremely enjoyable read. Agent, Kay McCauley. (May 18)
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From Booklist

Starred Review Obsessed with color and mostly ignored by her elegant mother, Mira spent her childhood waited on by silent women in an ornate house full of mirrors in Las Vegas, New Mexico. When mother disappears, Mira is sent to a foster family in Idaho that, changing its name, soon moves to Ohio, where the foster parents encourage Mira's budding artistic talent as she grows up, trying to be as normal as possible. She becomes an art teacher and, after her foster parents die in a car wreck, starts investigating her mother's disappearance and the Las Vegas house. She had known that she had a trust fund and that her trustees had specified that her foster parents change their name--and that they never take her to New Mexico--but not that she owns the house. Returning to Las Vegas, she finds that her mother's disappearance has never been explained. Strange things start happening: the silent women of her childhood reappear, ghostlike; she meets a woman hanged in the late 1800s; as she reads her foster mother's journals, clues to the truth about her mother and the house emerge. Lindskold conjures the atmosphere of nontourist New Mexico, beautifully evoking Las Vegas' long, turbulent history while spinning a fantastic yarn about Mira's odd inheritance. Neither an explosive story nor an edge-of-the-seat-thriller, the novel's strength lies in the unfolding of Mira's character. Regina Schroeder
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