THE BLACK PAINTING

By Neil Olson

This one may just have you staying away from artwork for the rest of your life!

A Goya painting has been rumored to cause madness to anyone who stares at it too long. One clan, by the name of Morse, has that particular painting in their family. It hung on a wall in their grandfather’s estate, a mansion named Owl’s Point, before the painting was suddenly stolen.

There are four cousins in the Morse family: One is a lawyer living on the West Coast; one is a med student who is genius-level; one is what you would call a hard-partying, hard-drinking gal; and the last, the youngest, is a girl by the name of Teresa who carries with her a deep-seeded fear that she is going to ‘go the way of’ her own father—a man who died of madness.

Out of the blue these four cousins get a call that they must immediately come to the old family estate. This is most definitely something that not one out of the four wants to do, seeing as that the last time they were there they were accused and vilified by their grandfather when that Goya painting disappeared from the mansion. In fact, that was the beginning of the end for the family as the fights sent them running their separate ways.

Attempting to have faith, they try to believe that their grandfather, now that he’s getting old, wants to get the family back together and put all the bad behind them. But when they arrive at Owl’s Point and Teresa sees that the old man is dead, all of them know that the worst is yet to come. Add to that the fact that the grandfather was literally dead with his eyes wide open…staring at the bare wall where the Goya painting used to hang.

This is an incredible plot with unknown twists that all readers who love mystery and suspense will thrive on.