I have a readalike author for you. If you like romantic suspense along the lines of Mary Stewart or Elizabeth Peters-being mostly suspense with just a dash of romance--let me recommend to you Carolyn Hart. Although she writes a number of cozy mystery series, she also has quite a few standalones that have been rejacketed and republished as "Carolyn Hart Classics", and if The Devereaux Legacy is anything to go by, they seem to be great fun.
The Devereaux Legacy was written in 1986 and was just reissued a couple of years ago. While the Elizabeth Peters novel I recently read did exude a sense of the 1970s (I don't use the word dated as it gave a sense of the era without losing anything in the telling of the story), this one travels very well through time so to speak. It is set in South Carolina where a young woman, Leah, has returned home after the death of her grandmother.
There is a catch--there's always a catch, right, or where would the story go otherwise? Leah has been living in Texas with her grandmother who has just passed away after suffering a heart attack. At the moment of her death she had been in the middle of composing a letter to Leah's other grandmother. It is quite a cryptic letter and was meant to accompany an article ripped from a magazine about Devereaux House, the plantation owned by Leah's mother's family. In the article it refers to a ghost, the Whispering Lady. Leah, however, never knew about the family home or that she had any other family left. Her parents died in a boating accident when she was a small child.
When Leah travels to South Carolina to follow up on what she had read, she discovers that she herself was thought to have perished along with her parents. For the Devereaux clan it is Leah who is like a ghost, "seeking her earthly home." She is the intruder, a ghost brought back from the grave. Her arrival at Devereaux House is a shock, but she is mostly welcomed back with warmth. But some in the family might not be quite so happy about her return from the dead, seeing that Devereaux House and all its environs will now revert to Leah as the one living blood relative. Her cousins are family by marriage alone. Of course the Devereaux children (all now adults) will surely be loathe to give it all up:
"The picture of the house showed it glowing creamy white in the late-afternoon sunshine. It had a high, stuccoed foundation, and two sets of steps mounted to the first-floor veranda. Wrought-iron railings framed the steps in graceful arabesque curves. Leaded windows sparkled fanlights. Sleek Doric columns supported the second-story veranda. The house was a magnificent symbol of an era long past, yet fascinating in the reality it reflected of another age. Leah could imagine a carriage turning up the oyster-shell driveway, carrying an elaborately gowned woman and her escort. She could almost see their faces . . ."
There is also a very mysterious tower on the property kept locked at all times, which is supposedly too dangerous to enter. And then there is the Whispering Lady. She is not often seen, but when she is, it is as a portent of death--someone in the Devereaux family will die. As a matter of fact one of the last time she was seen was when her parents were lost at sea.
This has been so far, a quick gentle sort of read. I have several more Carolyn Hart Classics on my shelf, but for now I am enjoying the unraveling of the mystery of the Whispering Lady and Leah's search for answers--what happened that fateful night when her parents died at sea, and why was she supposed to have perished with them!