Archie and Amélie: Love and Madness in the Gilded Age
by Donna M. Lucey (Harmony Books, $25.95)

"I heard of Archie and Amélie while tramping across the Virginia countryside just down the road from where the couple lived in the 1880s and 1890s, in the horse country outside Charlottesville. I had been invited for an autumn afternoon of 'beagling'—following a pack of hounds as they unsuccessfully tried to sniff out a rabbit. The point of beagling is not the hunt, but the walk through the enchanting landscape, amid the rolling hills of genteel historic estates, each of which contains a story. The most astonishing stories attached to Archie and Amélie. There were tales of séances and ghosts, a murder, the mysterious burning of a church, a sensational lunacy trial, and a hauntingly beautiful, barely clad young woman prowling her gardens at night as if she were searching for something—or someone—or trying to walk off the effects of the morphine that was deranging her.

I was inclined to dismiss all this as the tall tales Virginians love to spin; but when I looked into these yarns I found the proof that they were true in yellowing front pages with banner headlines, along with the letters, court papers, books, and manuscripts this extraordinary pair left behind. One of my informants on that autumn afternoon in the hills was a Rives herself, the wife of Amélie's distant cousin Barclay Rives, a horseman, raconteur, author, and enthusiastic collector of the odds and ends of local lore.…" --excerpted from the author's introduction