She enchants the warehouse family with her sensual carefree warmth, and promises of a new profitable trade selling beautiful statues of marble and bronze to fuel the classical craze among the wealthy landowners. Then, a beautiful widow, Livia, arrives from Venice, telling Alinor that her son Rob has drowned and that she needs their help. Meanwhile in New England, Alinor’s brother Ned cannot find justice in the New World, as the king’s revenge stretches across the Atlantic and turns the pioneers against each other and against the American Indians. He has everything to offer: money, land, status – and he believes she has the only thing he cannot buy: his son and heir. A wealthy man waits outside a poor London warehouse to meet with Alinor, the woman he failed twenty-one years before. A searing portrait of a woman that resonates across the ages' ( People).Midsummer’s Eve, 1670. 'Fans of Gregory's works and of historicals in general will delight in this page-turning tale' ( Library Journal, starred review) that is 'superb. 'This is Gregory par excellence' ( Kirkus Reviews). This is the time of witch-mania, and if the villagers discover the truth, they could take matters into their own hands. They have always whispered about the sinister power of Alinor's beauty, but the secrets they don't know about her and James are far more damning. Alinor's suspicious neighbors are watching each other for any sign that someone might be disloyal to the new parliament, and Alinor's ambition and determination mark her as a woman who doesn't follow the rules.

England is in the grip of a bloody civil war that reaches into the most remote parts of the kingdom. She shows him the secret ways across the treacherous marshy landscape of the Tidelands, not knowing she is leading a spy and an enemy into her life. Instead she meets James, a young man on the run. Until she can, she is neither maiden nor wife nor widow, living in a perilous limbo.

A country at warĪ woman with a dangerous secret On Midsummer's Eve, Alinor waits in the church graveyard, hoping to encounter the ghost of her missing husband and thus confirm his death. This New York Times bestseller from 'one of the great storytellers of our time' ( San Francisco Book Review) turns from the glamour of the royal courts to tell the story of an ordinary woman, Alinor, living in a dangerous time for a woman to be different.

The fairmile series