The Villainous Viscount Or The Curse Of The Venns

A funny good natured satire on the cliches of Gothic romance.

When Clarissa Greendale inherits the fortune from a disreputable uncle she hardly knows, she does not expect to find herself forced into marriage with an aristocratic fortune hunter and wild, brawling, debauched social outcast.

Neither does she expect to inherit too the legacy of a wrongdoing from half a century before...

For the wicked Lord Venn is rumoured to have inherited a family curse, which, having dispatched the main perpetrators of the old crime, now moves on to their heirs, who are just as wild a set of rakes as their elders. There are rumours of violent deaths preceded by appearances from an inexorable Hooded Spectre, of inexplicable strikes of lightning, and of haunted mirrors.

The light hearted Harley Venn dismisses all these as conjuring tricks. He even hires a drunken charlatan of a professional magican to prove it.

Clarinda is far from sure that there is any rational explanation. Still it would take more than an enforced marriage to a pugilistic libertine or persecution from malevolent spectres to damage her steely nerves and ready sense of the ridiculous.

This lively Gothic comedy gives the reader a warm hearted and courageous heroine, a wicked but beguiling anti-hero and an authentic historical background to the delightfully over-the-top adventures, plus a host of vivid supporting characters and many chills on its way to its tumultuous conclusion.