The Nightmare
A Mystery with Mary Wollstonecraft
-
- $14.99
-
- $14.99
Publisher Description
Feminist Mary Wollstonecraft meets Henry Fuseli at her publisher’s circle of intellectuals, philosophers, and artists, and becomes obsessed with him and his erotic painting The Nightmare. When it is stolen, Fuseli accuses young painter Roger Peale, who is clapped into Newgate Prison. Escaping with the aid of a French émigré from the Revolution, Peale is ambushed by a highwayman and taken to a madhouse. Meanwhile Fuseli’s footman, a witness to the theft, is killed in a carriage “accident.” And bluestocking Isobel Frothingham is strangled after a soiree and posed to resemble Fuseli’s perverse masterpiece. Wollstonecraft’s impetuous nature leads her to propose a ménage à trois with Fuseli and his wife, and when rebuffed—always on the side of the underdog—to investigate the case to clear the young artist and rescue Isobel’s illegitimate daughter. Wright’s first mystery with Mary Wollstonecraft, Midnight Fires, was called “captivating” by Publishers Weekly. And mystery author Patricia Wynn says, “The Nightmare does what good historical fiction should do—makes me wonder where the truth ends and fiction begins.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Wright skillfully evokes the people and ideas from the age of Enlightenment in her entertaining second mystery featuring Mary Wollstonecraft (after 2010's Midnight Fires), which once again shows how Mary's brilliance as a freethinker could have made her an expert crime-solver. In 1792, Mary is completing the second part of her renowned A Vindication of the Rights of Woman when her friend, painter Henry Fuseli, finds his famous painting The Nightmare stolen. Henry suspects a critic of his work and has the young man imprisoned. But when an acquaintance is murdered and her corpse left in a tableau suggestive of the artwork, Mary finds herself investigating an intrigue steeped in politics of the day characteristic of a conservative England and a revolutionary France. Several illegitimate children of uncertain paternity provide red herrings, and walk-ons by Fuseli, poet William Blake, and chemist Joseph Priestley help ground events in credible historical reality.