Jezebel's Daughter

Two men die on the same winter night in Victorian London, and their widows inherit vastly different legacies. Mrs. Fontaine receives her husband's chemical research on poisons, along with his debts and secrets. Mrs. Wagner inherits a fortune and her husband's plans to reform the asylum system, championing the gentle treatment of the mad and hiring women in his firm's offices. As Mrs. Wagner works to release a harmless man from the madhouse, her nephew journeys to Frankfurt to work alongside German merchants, where he encounters Minna Fontaine, a young woman whose mother possesses deadly knowledge and darker intentions. Collins weaves a tale of poison, madness, and Victorian hypocrisy, exposing what happens when women are left to navigate a world designed to contain them. The title Jezebel is no accident: this is a story about the uses of female 'wickedness' in a society that names ambition in women a kind of madness.