Scarlet Night, The Julie Hayes Mysteries

A Manhattan woman visits a Soho gallery and stumbles into a mystery in this novel by an Edgar Award winner who “can build suspense to a sonic peak” (Los Angeles Times).
 It starts innocently enough. Julie Hayes and her husband have just returned to Manhattan from a month in Paris. Julie looks forward to spending quality time with Jeff, whose career as a journalist takes him away from home for months on end. Now if they could just find the perfect work of art to hang over their mantel.
Julie’s quest takes her to a trendy SoHo gallery where she meets an itinerant artist named Ralph Abel. Julie instantly falls in love with one of his paintings, Scarlet Night, and is stunned to discover that itcan be hers—for a mere one hundred dollars. But then the artist disappears and it becomes apparent that somebody else wants the painting . . . and will do whatever it takes to possess it.
Scarlet Night is the second novel in Dorothy Salisbury Davis’s Julie Hayes mystery series, which also includes A Death in the Life, Lullaby of Murder, and The Habit of Fear, as well as the stories “The Puppet” and “Justina” in the collection In the Still of the Night.