Summary
A Manhattan columnist who trades in perfumed half-truths about love is dared to prove that romance still breathes outside the city’s neon arteries; she blindly sticks a pin in the map and lands on Essex, Connecticut, a salt-kissed hamlet where the elm shadows lie longer than bank ledgers. The moment her heel strikes the platform she is swallowed by a case of mistaken identity—hailed as the long-lost Turkish relation of Robert Stratton, a Great War aviator whose lungs are as shredded as his family fortune. Inside the candle-scented corridors of the Stratton manse she discovers that the resident doctor and his serpentine sister have been siphoning the estate while seasoning the heir’s supper with mercury and nightshade. Caught sniffing the conspiracy, the impostor columnist is hurled down a brick well, left to commune with groundwater and her own hypocrisy; she claws out, mud-slick and reborn, in time to sabotage the final lethal banquet. The physician perishes in a green cloud of his own concoction, his sibling is clapped in irons, and the columnist—her cynicism scorched away—chooses the slow, uncertain rhythm of a life beside the wheezing hero over the clatter of typewriters and deadlines.
Synopsis
Rosalie Beckwith, a New York City newspaper romance advisor, is told by her editor that he is thinking about discontinuing her column because there is no such thing as true romance. Rosalie bets her job against a month's wages that she can find a real romance story within forty miles of the office, and selects, at random, the small town of Essex, Connecticut. However, when she arrives in Essex, Rosalie is mistaken for Madame Murat Bey, a distant relative of wealthy wounded war hero Robert "Bob" Stratton and the co-heir of his estate. Accepting the situation, Rosalie discovers that Dr. Thomas Fitch, Bob's family physician, is conspiring with his sister, Grace Fitch, to poison the patient before he discovers Fitch has embezzled funds belonging to the estate. When the Fitches realize Rosalie has uncovered their perfidy, they throw her into a well. Then Grace, disguising herself as the "real" Madame Bey, arrives to announce that Rosalie was an imposter. Rosalie escapes in time to prevent Bob from eating poisoned food, Dr. Fitch is killed by toxic fumes in his laboratory, and Grace is arrested. Rosalie gives up her newspaper job to live with Bob.
