The Heart Specialist

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.