While she was growing up in the peaceful Long Island village, Irene Haverly would have been appalled if she had known that someday she would have to live in the tragedy-haunted Fonsell house. But now she was caught in a trap, a cruel one for a respectable girl of the 1870's. With no husband and no proof that she ever had one, she found she was to have a child.

And so she struck a bargain with stocky, ambitious Jason Fonsell, the illegitimate half-brother of the father of her unborn child. She needed a husband. As for Jason, he wanted the money Irene's aunt was pathetically eager to supply. With it he hoped to revive Sag Harbor's trade with the West Indies, and thus become rich and powerful in the town that shunned him--not just because of his illegitimacy or his father's scandalous ways, but because of the violent and unexplained death years before of Julia Fonsell, his beautiful young stepmother.

Soon after Irene entered its ugly portals as Jason's unloved and unloving bride, the Fonsell house was again visited by sudden death. Who was the killer? What link could there be between this new tragedy and the mysterious murder of the past? Only as long as she did not know the answers would Irene's own life be safe.

Here, set in a historic whaling village and on a colorful Caribbean island, is a spellbinding tale of Gothic horror and romance.

(book cover description)