WINFIELD: Living in the Shadow of the Woolworths

When Dominick Dunne praises a book, you can be sure about the subject: rich people and fabulous houses. But readers should be warned: this page-turner is also a weird ghost story. Randall, who spent her teen years raiding soon-to-be-destroyed mansions on Long Island's Gold Coast, "rescuing" everything from fixtures to furniture, later lived in Winfield, the mansion built by the fabulously wealthy and eccentric (he was obsessed with Napoleon) F.W. Woolworth. A former fashion model, photographer and author of another book about Gold Coast mansions, Randall moves from historical drama to melodrama when detailing how she came to call Winfield home. But she achieves an ideal balance between the bizarre and the compelling; even her romance with a mysterious, and occasionally obnoxious, foreigner seems plausible. Toward the end, after a visitor to Winfield develops stigmata, a rat appears possessed by a long-dead spirit, and a desperate search for an Egyptian tomb behind a wall in the mansion's basement threatens to turn deadly, readers will expect Randall to confess that she's made the whole thing up. But not only does she make no such confession, she's researched psychic phenomena in an effort to make sense of it all, providing a creepy example of how truth can be not only stranger, but sometimes more gripping, than fiction. 16 pages of b&w photos not seen by PW. (May)