Book overview
Someone is trying to kill Randi Appolina at the Chautauqua Institution because she knows something she doesn't know she knows. Randi accidentally overheard a conversation between two strangers planning to murder her beautiful next door neighbor. But no one believes Randi heard what she heard, not even after her neighbor is found dead.
Talented and ambitious for a career as an actress, the seventeen year old heroine of One Broken Summer is emotionally torn over the promise she made to her father to try to keep her mother happy for the summer. Randi didn't know, however, when she made that promise her mother had already rented an apartment at Chautauqua that didn't permit dogs.
Terrified something might happen to her beloved old dog, Sooty, while she's away, Randi asks her boyfriend, Jeff, if she should keep that promise. But Jeff's dismissive and Randi now realizes she's totally on her own.
So with hostility toward her mother for renting that apartment she keeps her promise and reluctantly goes with her.
Stunned when she discovers Chautauqua's theater company will audition young women for a role in a famous play, Randi slightly softens her hostility and determines to use her recent first place rankings in forensics as her credential to try out for the part. Randi succeeds at getting the part which parallels her own fraught relationship with her mother and her mother's secret history at Chautauqua. An outsider among Chautauqua's elite society, Randi finds her own friends and unexpectedly falls in love with a talented young actor from California. Still in love with Jeff, however, Randi feels conflicted when she's in DeAndre's arms.
Although frustrated with her love life nothing compares to Randi dealing with the attempts made on her life. After surviving a push off a fifteen foot bridge and the fall into a rocky ravine she fearlessly continues trying to find her neighbor's killer. She stumbles along several false paths of inquiry until she finally discovers the truth. And on the morning after her triumphant opening night she confronts the killer.
