The Mystery of a Turkish Bath by Rita

Description

Rita, the prolific Victorian novelist behind a shelf of fashionable fictions, sets this one where her readers’ imagination could meet hers: the Turkish bath of a great hotel on the English coast, a place of marble, steam and unnaturally frank conversation. A group of ladies, freed by heat and privacy from their drawing-room selves, begin to tell on one another, and one story in particular, offered as a piece of sparkle, arrives wearing a supernatural edge it refuses to shed.

Courtesies bubble and boil as the chapters move from alcove to alcove and chapter to chapter, curving through the first room, the cooling room, conjecture and enchantment, toward premonition, dream and expiation. The novel is tissue-thin in the approved manner of its school, but the chill underneath is genuine: a sharp-eyed study of women’s society that keeps its hand on the temperature, and knows exactly when the laughter should stop.

For fans of the supernatural novel

• A witty late-Victorian frame story told entirely inside a hot, half-private room.
• Sharp social comedy that refuses to stay comic.
• From Rita, whose supernatural touch was praised even by reviewers who frowned at her scandals.

About This DodaBooks Edition

The complete 16 chapters are reset in clean, continuous type with a working index.