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A post-mortem photographer unearths dark secrets of the past that may hold the key to his future, in this captivating debut novel in the gothic tradition of Wuthering Heights and The Thirteenth Tale.All love stories are ghost stories in disguise. When famed Byronesque poet Hugh de Bonne is discovered dead of a heart attack in his bath one morning, his cousin Robert Highstead, a historian turned post-mortem photographer, is charged with a simple task: transport Hugh's remains for burial in a chapel. This chapel, a stained glass folly set on the moors of Shropshire, was built by de Bonne sixteen years earlier to house the remains of his beloved wife and muse, Ada. Since then, the chapel has been locked and abandoned, a pilgrimage site for the rabid fans of de Bonne's last book, The Lost History of Dreams. However, Ada's grief-stricken niece refuses to open the glass chapel for Robert unless he agrees to her bargain: before he can lay Hugh to rest, Robert must record Isabelle's story of Ada and Hugh's ill-fated marriage over the course of five nights. As the mystery of Ada and Hugh's relationship unfolds, so does the secret behind Robert's own marriage - including that of his fragile wife, Sida, who has not been the same since the tragic accident three years ago, and the origins of his own morbid profession that has him seeing things he shouldn't - things from beyond the grave. Kris Waldherr effortlessly spins a sweeping and atmospheric gothic mystery about love and loss that blurs the line between the past and the present, truth and fiction, and ultimately, life and death.



About the Author

Kris Waldherr

Kris Waldherr is an award-winning author, illustrator, and designer whose many books include DOOMED QUEENS, THE LOVER'S PATH, and THE BOOK OF GODDESSES. She is also the creator of the Goddess Tarot, which has a quarter of a million copies in print, and other card decks including the Lover's Path Tarot and the Sacred World Oracle.

The New Yorker praised DOOMED QUEENS as "utterly satisfying" and "deliciously perverse." Her book design for DOOMED QUEENS won first place at the New York Book Show in the quality paperback category. THE BOOK OF GODDESSES was a One Spirit/Book-of-the-Month Club's Top Ten Most Popular Book. THE BOOK OF GODDESSES inspired the Goddess Tarot, as well as a Grammy-nominated chamber music suite by composer Robert Paterson. Her picture book retelling of the Persephone myth, PERSEPHONE AND THE POMEGRANATE, was noted by the New York Times Book Review for its "quality of myth and magic." She is a member of the Historical Novel Society, where she moderated a panel on the writing and marketing of literary versus commercial historical fiction.

As a visual artist, Waldherr has had illustrations published as greeting cards, book covers, and in calendars and magazines. Her art has been exhibited in many galleries and museums, including the National Museum of Women in the Arts, the Mazza Museum, and the Ruskin Library.

Kris Waldherr works and lives in Brooklyn in a Victorian-era house with her husband, the anthropologist-curator Thomas Ross Miller, and their young daughter. Visit her online at KrisWaldherr.com.



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