Monte-Cristo's Daughter

The daughter of the Count of Monte-Cristo inherits her father's mystique and her mother's beauty. Zuleika, raised in shadowed luxury between Constantinople and Paris, captures the heart of Viscount Giovanni Massetti, a passionate young Roman nobleman. But when Giovanni's innocent kindness to a flower-girl entangles him in a web of false accusations abduction and murder his mind shatters, and he is torn from Zuleika's arms. The great Count himself must unravel the conspiracy that threatens his family, deploying the cunning that once made him emperor of the Mediterranean underworld. This is a novel of furious love, institutional madness, and a father's terrible power to destroy or redeem. Edmund Flagg writes with the breathless momentum of serialized fiction at its finest, trading in the currencies of Victorian fantasy: noble suffering, hairsbreadth rescues, and the certainty that a great man's will can bend fate itself. For readers who wanted more of the Count after the original novel's end, this provides a gorgeously excessive answer.