The Brimstone Wedding

"It's crazy thinking I can tell her," says Genevieve Warner, thirty-two years old, thirteen years into a loveless marriage, and recently swept into her first passionate love affair. "She's so old. She'll have forgotten what sex is." But Stella Newland, the gracious, dignified, dying woman that Genevieve cares for in an English nursing home, has not forgotten. She knows all about love: its promises, its betrayals, its sometimes deadly consequences. She learned her lessons thirty years ago in a country house she owned, and owns still. When Genevieve confides in Stella, the old woman reciprocates by giving Genevieve the key to the now forlorn house, and by telling this young woman who will be her last friend, in the few minutes a day her failing strength allows, the story of her own erotic entanglement in adultery and worse, much worse. Both a finely crafter mystery and a disturbingly honest depiction of the kinship between love and madness, "The Brimstone Wedding" upholds Barbara Vines reputation as one of the finest practitioners of her craft.