The Last Aristocrats: A Historical Novel

A Peer of France. A murdered duchess. A death that never happened.In the gray dawn of August 18, 1847, the Duchesse de Choiseul-Praslin was found in her Paris bedroom, her throat cut, her body bearing forty-seven wounds. Her husband - a Peer of France, heir to a name six centuries old - stood accused. But a public trial would have exposed every secret of a rotting aristocracy, and the most powerful men in France could not allow it. Six days later, the Duke was pronounced dead by his own hand. The scandal helped topple a monarchy. It was also a lie.Behind the sealed coffin, the living Duke was spirited out of France under a dead man's name, in the keeping of a single young guardian - Gaston d'Audiffret-Pasquier, the old Chancellor's heir, bound to carry the secret to the far side of the world. Their road runs from the salons of Paris to the docks of New York and, at last, into the volcano country of Nicaragua - where a murderer must reckon with what, if anything, can be built from the ruins of the man he was.Spanning thirty-five years and two continents, The Last Aristocrats is a sweeping story of guilt, exile, and the fragile hope of redemption: two men living under borrowed names, the families they make and the families they leave behind, and the women who must decide whether to forgive them. Drawn from real history - and from the author's own fifteen-year genealogical search, with its jurist in the Nicaraguan highlands, its nine-year silence in a French family's records, and its unexplained relic on a Normandy mantel - it asks the question no court would answer: can a life spent healing ever weigh against a life taken in violence?The powerful protect their own. The archives burn. But the dead cry out for the truth - long after the living have conspired to bury it.For readers of literary historical fiction - and for anyone moved by the true crime behind Rachel Field's All This, and Heaven Too.