Rachel returned home with a heavy heart. Once Cypress Hall had been the grandest of plantations, her parents happy and wealthy and very much alive. Now a gruesome tragedy had taken her parents' lives, and Rachel was the new mistress of the large plantation.

Rachel expected great sorrow, but she did not expect the strange events that marked her homecoming--her own near-death on the riverboat; her sudden love for the gallant stranger who saved her life; and then-the unspeakable chilling moment when she began to suspect that something worse than evil was in the air, that the beloved father she mourned was, indeed, still alive!

A queen-size gothic.