Spitting Gold

Paris, 1866. Baroness Sylvie Devereux has left her past as a celebrated and fraudulent spirit medium far behind her. When her disowned sister Charlotte Mothe turns up at her door, Sylvie fears that past has finally caught up with her. Their father is ill, though, and Charlotte cannot afford his bills, so Sylvie is talked into running one last con alongside her.

Their targets are the de Jacquinots, a dysfunctional aristocratic family convinced that they are haunted by a great aunt who was brutally murdered during the French Revolution. With the scheme under way, the sisters use every trick they know to frighten the family into handing over its gold.

Then inexplicable horrors begin to strike the sisters as well, and they start to wonder whether they really are at the mercy of a vengeful spirit, and what other dark secrets might surface. This gothic mystery, set in nineteenth-century Paris, weaves in a sapphic romance. It is Carmella Lowkis's debut.