Description: An upper-class woman recovering from a suicide attempt, Margaret Prior has begun visiting Millbank Prison, Victorian London's grimmest women's jail, as part of her rehabilitative charity work. Among the prisoners -- murderers, petty thieves, and prostitutes -- she meets a lovely and enigmatic spiritualist named Selina Dawes. A medium of some renown, Selina was imprisoned after a seance she was conducting went awry, leaving an elderly woman dead and a young woman profoundly disturbed. A skeptic, Margaret is at first unwilling to believe Selina's claims of supernatural powers, but as the two grow closer, Selina begins sending her messages -- a hank of braided hair appears mysteriously on Margaret's bed, flowers appear from nowhere, and somehow, Selina knows things about Margaret she'd never before revealed. "We share an affinity", Selina tells her, and Margaret, seduced by the mystery of this shadowy world and Selina's gifts, concocts a plot to secure Selina's freedom. But does Selina really have otherworldly powers, or is Margaret -- who's been taking doses of morphine and laudanum as part of her psychiatric treatment -- simply seeing things? A wonderfully moody, haunting ghost story, "Affinity" is a truly pulse-quickening read, a spine-tingling mystery awash with the scenes, sights, and smells of a dark and gloomy 19th-century London.

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