THE TRUMPETING ANGEL - Marshall Browne

This is a story of love, scandal and murder, set in Melbourne in 1899. Susan Fairfax is a successful businesswoman and leading suffragette. Although beautiful and in her early thirties, she has never married, and shares a house with a female artist. She finds herself attracted to John Deveraux, a wealthy politician, but discovers that his wife died in mysterious circumstances a year ago. So she rejects Deveraux' offer of marriage. He takes his revenge by accusing her at the governor's dinner table of being a lesbian, and she sues him for slander. Is Deveraux right? Whatever the case, he seems to be growing slightly insane. The resulting legal action becomes linked with the efforts of his father-in-law to prove that Deveraux was responsible for his daughter's death, and Deveraux's increasingly desperate attempts to frustrate attempts to delve into his background. It emerges that at the heart of this gripping story lies one of the most common illnesses of the nineteenth century–syphilis–and the efforts of a powerful man to hide its devastating effects on himself and his family.