PS: About that NIGHTMARE

Was this book better than its cover? I don't know because I've never read it. This is just another book that spent over 30 years on the bookshelf in the family cabin.

Funny thing is, according to the back cover copy, the story took place at a cabin in the California mountains. Maybe that's why I never read it. On moonlit nights walking through the snow from the parking lot to the cabin, around a quarter-of-a-mile, the last thing I wanted to think about was murder.

This book, as far as I can determine, is no longer in print. This edition was published in June 1968. The author, Dolores Hitchens, died in 1973, only a few years after this book took up residency on the cabin shelf. I'm not finding much about the author online other than Wikipedia, a nice piece at Mystery File (see D. B. Olsen), and a brief piece at Vintage Hardboiled Reads.

Julia Clara Catharine Dolores Birk Olsen Hitchens (1907–1973), better known as Dolores Hitchens, was an American mystery novelist who wrote prolifically from 1938 until her death. She also wrote under the pseudonyms D. B. Olsen, Dolan Birkley and Noel Burke.

Hitchens collaborated on five railroad mysteries with her second husband, Bert Hitchens, a railroad detective, and also branched out into other genres in her writing, including Western stories. Many of her mystery novels centered around a spinster character named Rachel Murdock.

Hitchens wrote Fool's Gold, the 1958 novel adapted by Jean-Luc Godard for his film Bande à part (Band of Outsiders, 1964). (SOURCE: Wikipedia)

Click on the source link above to see a list of Hitchen's books.

No information is given about the cover illustrator.