Original Sins

A young woman's journey into the slave-holding South to discover the fate of a lost child. Why would a runaway Virginia slave - having built a rewarding life in the East Indies as a silk merchant - risk everything by returning to America in 1840, eighteen years after taking her freedom? Anibaddh Lyngdoh claims that she intends to introduce a new kind of silk to the floundering American silk industry. But her true reason, as her old friend Grace MacDonald Pollocke discovers, is far more personal. Grace, now a Philadelphia portrait painter, undertakes a perilous investigation that leads to the discovery of old sins and crimes, and the commission of new ones. What laws may be broken - what sins and crimes committed - in the service of a higher justice? Deceit, forgery, fraud, perjury . . . even murder?

This novel thrillingly evokes a nineteenth-century America not so different from the present: a time of stunning new technologies and financial collapse, when religious and racial views collided with avowed principles of morality and law. .


Genre: Historical