The Master of Blue Mire
by Virginia Coffman
published by Dell Books
Copyright 1971
When lovely young Livia Roy was sent by Captain Nicholas Brandon to the isolated manor of Blue Mire, she was warned that the two Brandon children might seem strange, their minds still affected by the mysterious violent death of their beautiful mother.
But nothing could have prepared Livia for the hate in her youthful charges' eyes - or the growing signs they were in league with the evil that seemed to haunt this accursed mansion where so many already had died. Could these angelic-looking children be spawns of Satan? And if they were, what kind of man then was their father, handsome and dashing Nicholas Brandon, who Livia so helplessly loved and desperately feared? ...
I am sure you will agree that this book description has all sorts of awesome going on with it. We have our heroine who is not only lovely, but young. - Who would have thought! - We also have her new employer and lord of the manor Captain Brandon - We will just drop the Nicholas so we can pretend a loose association with Jane Austen to hopefully help the WRFH genre gain a little residual respect. - and we have evil young children.
I for one have a handful of evil children at home and personally I go out of my way to avoid mentioning that they might seem strange or their questionable evil Satan pedigree when looking for a sitter but baby-sitting gigs were probably harder to snag back in the day.
One last thought. Am I the only one who has the fact that Livia helplessly loves and desperately fears Captain Brandon setting off all kinds of warning bells?
I have also received this awesome cover from John in California. This cover for The Yellow Gold of Tiryns besides being very cool has the distinction of being one of the rare Strange Dude On the Cover covers that I have so few of. It also appears from my research, and PLEASE let me know if I this is incorrect, that the cover for this edition was actually illustrated by the book's author Helena Osborne.
In the process of trying to locate the illustration information, I have also stumbled across this alternate cover for a later edition.
My thanks go out to John for sharing!
