The Luck of the Vails: A Novel
1901
The Luck of the Vails inverts fortune itself. When the ancient gold goblet is lost, its owner fears nothing. When it is found again, fire and frost and rain become omens of doom. This is the curse that awaits Harry Vail on the eve of his twenty-first birthday, when he discovers the jeweled chalice hidden in his family's attic. What begins as an unexpected inheritance becomes a descent into familial darkness, as the cup gradually reveals a long legacy of corruption, violence, and old sins buried beneath the aristocratic surface of the Vail name. E.F. Benson crafts a perfectly dread-soaked Edwardian gothic, where the rolling Wiltshire dales freeze with menace and London's gaslit streets cast long shadows of secrets. Harry must confront not only the curse he has brought upon himself, but the truth of the family he inherited everything from. It is vintage crime fiction wrapped in supernatural dread, a novel that understands how the past literally haunts the present, and how some inheritances are better left unclaimed.
