A business trip that brings Mallory from his Iowa home to New York City has been stretched to include his playing a “suspect” in a mystery weekend at Mohonk Mountain House, the rambling upstate New York resort that almost seems to have been designed as backdrop to a murder — real or fictional. In its winding halls and unexpected nooks and crannies, avid fans to try to solve a “crime” acted out by a gaggle of mystery writers, their spouses and companions. Mallory, along with his lover, Jill Forrest, is looking forward to a weekend of fun and relaxation. Curt Clark, the crime writer who is stage-managing this annual outing, has trickily chosen the intended “victim” — mystery critic Kirk Rath, whose magazine has become influential enough to make or break a writer’s career and whose word processor is a thinly disguised dagger kept sharp on authors’ reputations. Author Mallory’s fictional crimes have a way of being topped by real ones, and this is no exception. Or is it? On their first night there, while Jill is incommunicado in the shower, Mallory sees what he believes to be a real murder from his bedroom window. But when he and Jill brave the snow to investigate, there is no body, no blood, no evidence of foul play. Either Mallory is the victim of a prank or this is a part of the crime enactment that Curt Clark was sneakily keeping to himself. Mallory is not convinced, however. And then he and Jill come across evidence that the murder is no joke, and that the snowstorm rapidly cutting off the mountain house from the rest of the world is quite possibly shutting in the game-players and staff with a real killer