A Bitter Reckoning; Or, Violet Arleigh

On the eve of her eighteenth birthday, Violet Arleigh dances at her first ball, radiant and unaware that her mother's past is about to crash through the glittering doors. Rosamond receives a telegram bearing a single name: Gilbert Warrington. Three words thaticu the specter of a scandal long buried, a secret weapon wielded by a man who has waited years for his moment of reckoning. As champagne flows and violins sing, Rosamond confronts the terrible arithmetic of her youth: a moment of weakness, a man who would not let her forget it, and a daughter whose innocence must now be sacrificed to protect her from the truth. The stage is set for a confrontation that will leave one of them dead. This is Victorian melodrama at its most intoxicating and ruthless, a sensation novel that understands how neatly respectable surfaces conceal the most vicious depths. For readers who relish the Gothic pleasures of Wilkie Collins and the pitiless plotting of classic stage melodrama, here is a story where every secret has a price and every choice a consequence measured in blood.