The Fortune Hunter Author:Meagan McKinney A young spiritualist is drawn against her will into the world of the flesh, where she discovers desire, obsession and revenge.... — It's 1881, a time when all of New York is caught up in the spiritualist frenzy, and nothing is more fashionable than attending a seance. In Manhattan, there is no medium more revered than the mysterious Countess Lova... more »enya. It is said that even Mrs. Astor ventures to the Countess's Fifth Avenue townhouse to converse with her dear departed friends.
As mysterious as the Countess is, she keeps nothing more secret than her true identity. She wants no one to know she is really Lavinia Murphy, who fled a brutal St. Louis orphanage with four younger "siblings" and learned a spiritualist's ways from the carnies and gypsies she met on the road to New York City.
But now that she has built a career and a safe haven for her troubled family, Lavinia is confronted by a phantom more fearsome than any she's ever conjured in her shadowy parlor. For Edward Stuyvesant-French -- the illegitimate son of Lavinia's wealthiest, and most frequent client -- has vowed to destroy her.
To protect her family, Lavinia will enter into an uneasy bargain with the powerful and bitter Edward, one that will force her into a world darker than any she's ever known. There she will encounter the specters, both living and dead, haunting Edward's life -- Alice, his mother, who died pining for an unfaithful lover; Wilhelm, his father, who clawed his way up to magnificent riches only to descend into madness; and Daisy, his half-sister, who, withdrawn and wheelchair-bound, sits lonely in the marble halls of her father's barren mansion, dreaming of passion.
The young spiritualist who discovers a different kind of phenomenon -- that hate and anger have another side, too, and that beyond the darkness of a bitter soul may lie a heart aching for comfort, acceptance and life-healing love....« less