Slate Gardens — Stephen Donald Huff

He is the worst of the worst; a perverted deviant and an elusive killer who presents himself as an old-fashioned country preacher. She is the distraught widow of a man who successfully embezzled a fortune. With her two young children, she lives amid the dilapidated ruins of a declining estate named Slate Gardens, where rumor insists three million dollars remains hidden. Beguiled by the preacher's psychotic manipulations, the widow takes him into her home as her second husband and a malign father to her vulnerable son and daughter. She longs for companionship and love. He craves only profit.A paroled convict and undetected serial killer murders a notorious embezzler in a prison shower, having confirmed the presence of a fortune hidden somewhere on the grounds of his victim's former home, Slate Gardens. Using all the guile of a handsome though psychopathic country parson, he will seduce and possess the man's lonely widow and then overpower her children in an obscene quest for stolen wealth.