A Cassandra Reilly Mystery

Trouble in Transylvania

Plot

Cassandra Reilly, the globetrotting translator first introduced in award-winning Gaudi Afternoon, is on the road again, this time to China by way of Budapest, where she plans to catch the Trans-Mongolian Express. But a series of chance encounters on the train leads Cassandra, accompanied by her irrepressible friend Jacqueline Opal and the beautiful Hungarian Eva Kalvin, to the mythic Carpathian mountains of Transylvania. There, at a crumbling health spa directed by sinister Dr. Pustulescu, Cassandra soon finds herself entangled with a host of intriguing characters: the Snapps, an American family with a mysteriously withdrawn four-year-old Romanian daughter; Gladys Bentwhistle, who is hoping Pustulescu's wonder drug, Ionvital, can help her beat old age; and Nadia Pop, the enigmatic director of the Romanian tourist agency.

Cassandra Reilly, American expatriate and translator, finds herself among a cast of intriguing and flamboyant characters in a mountain spa in Transylvania, where she tackles vampires, the Romanian police, and religion to solve a murder.