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A new life
What do the living owe to the dead? In “Memory’s Bride,” spinster Claire Burton casts off her claustrophobic existence in her parents’ conventional home and embraces a new life in the remote Welsh foothills.
There, she devotes herself to preserving the memory of the man she had hoped to marry, a popular Victorian novelist whose death made her a wealthy woman. But her scandalous inheritance chains her to the past and isolates her. Even her family casts her off.
A new love?
Despite the stain on her reputation, two men soon pay court.
Claire is powerfully drawn to Rhys Fitzgordon, a man who seems to benefit too frequently from accidents. The death of his older brother gave him the title of Viscount Montfort, then the death of his wife provided the money he lacked. He is determined to recover the ancestral land his brother sold to settle debts – the land bequeathed to Claire.
Handsome and confident, Edward Latimer seems the safer choice, but he is haunted by the disappearance of his sister, Lucy, two years earlier. Claire gradually realizes he believes the secret to Lucy’s whereabouts is hidden in the house she now owns and that he is eager to bury the secret, no matter the cost.
Dangerous discoveries
As Claire unravels the mystery of her inheritance and begins to open her heart to love again, she makes painful discoveries about herself, her lovers and the complexities of human passion before she finds true love.
(Under the title “Daughter of Eve,” “Memory’s Bride” was a finalist for a Daphne du Maurier award in the unpublished historical category in 2015.)