The Swimming Pool by Mary Roberts Rinehart

The estate is all that is left to them after the family fortunes took a decided dip after the crash of 1929 and their father's suicide shortly thereafter. Lois Maynard and her brother Phil live in genteel poverty at The Birches, the family estate. There's a body in the damn swimming pool, you need to get these jokers to cough up some info! I wanted to wring the neck of every single other character - and the heroine as well, for not wringing the necks of every single other character. she pulls that in each chapter, sometimes multiple times, ugh so irritating and (2) every other character besides the heroine knows something super important about the mystery and just point blank refuses to tell her. later she was to learn how wrong she was. I would have liked this so much more though if (1) the author didn't constantly try to ramp up the tension with strenuously ominous foreshadowing i.e. The writing is fine and the characterization is sharp and often subtle. A hot cop whose swim trunk-clad body causes our heroine to drool time and time again. An intrepid teen, smoking at the dinner table with his relatives, this was definitely a different era. A beautiful woman, a woman defined by her beauty, a woman of much ugliness within, a woman much like her mother, trained carefully by that mother for a life of perfect shallow uselessness. The glamorous past revisited, deconstructed, glossed over, forgotten and remembered and reevaluated, memories like yellowing photos in an album crumbling when you pull them out for a closer look. A heroine who knows little but steps up bravely, each and every time.

He served as secretary to the East Bay Regional Park District board of directors for 19 years, and continued to serve on the board until his death in 1958.A tense and moody affair. The park opened in 1953, and was named to honor Thomas J. Roberts is also the former location of the Blossom Rock Navigation Trees, a California historical landmark commemorating several extra-tall redwoods that were used as a navigational aid. It also includes an archery range near the Redwood Bowl entrance.

In addition to a large, beautiful redwood grove, it has numerous picnic sites, a swimming pool, various playing fields, and a 'barrier free' (i.e., wheel-chair accessible) playground. Roberts Regional Recreation Area is an East Bay Regional Park that is part of Redwood Regional Park.

The Swimming Pool by Mary Roberts Rinehart