Gretchen Burnham Sprague was a legal services lawyer in Brooklyn, New York, for eleven years. She retired to the Hudson Highlands to write the Martha Patterson mysteries. Sprague died in an accident in 2003.
I originally read this book when I was in 7th grade. I remembered the title and I remembered liking the book very much. As an adult, I looked it up on Amazon and found a used library copy to purchase. The book is excellent. It is a well crafted and suspenseful story. It looks like the library decimal system had it listed as a young adult book. By comparison, this book written in 1967 is vastly superior to the junk being passed off as young adult books today. The vocabulary was high school level. There were no grammar mistakes. The story was tight with no plot holes. There was also a reflective ending dealing with morality. A very satisfying read. Perhaps modern young adult authors should take a few more grammar and writing classes. Oh, and their editors too!
Signpost to Terror is a product of its time with all of the tension of a made-for-TV movie. The mystery is mostly solved by the middle of the novel with enough clues for readers to put any lingering pieces together for themselves easily; that the cover proclaims "Voted a Best Mystery of the Year by yhe Mystery Writers of America" indicates that the afore-mentioned body didn't have a lot of options to choose from that year. Not a terrible read, but not anything so compelling that I need to read it again.