Bronze

Jude Atkins travels to South Carolina to meet Peter Benedict, a wealthy and successful painter she met on the Internet, and who she thinks she loves. What should be a normal courtship becomes a twisted descent into a dark family legacy in which art threatens life. The Benedict family's secret and the dark ambitions of the beautiful, sinister sculptor Ava Benedict, Peter's mother, threaten to engulf Jude, Peter, and everything they hold dear.Skyhorse Publishing, under our Night Shade and Talos imprints, is proud to publish a broad range of titles for readers interested in science fiction (space opera, time travel, hard SF, alien invasion, near-future dystopia), fantasy (grimdark, sword and sorcery, contemporary urban fantasy, steampunk, alternative history), and horror (zombies, vampires, and the occult and supernatural), and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller, a national bestseller, or a Hugo or Nebula award-winner, we are committed to publishing quality books from a diverse group of authors.

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. The cost of being a slave to talent, fame or fortune provides the theme for this exceptional thriller from Reed, an expert at creating witty cautionary tales (Thinner Than Thou). Sinister secrets lurk at Wayward, a South Carolina plantation, whose "doomed inhabitants," the Benedicts, are "caught in a dark globe of family obsession, terrible and huge." More than a hundred years earlier, Beauchamp Benedict's famous sculpture, God and His Creation, mysteriously disappeared en route to the National Cathedral, and now a centennial celebration is in the works, masterminded by the leader of his descendants, the maniacal Ava Benedict. The Benedicts have continued to awe the world with their sculptures, which, alas, require blood sacrifice. Judith "Jude" Atkins, a lowly jewelry designer, may become a victim, along with 11-year-old Edgar Benedict, the little brother of Peter, a painter who wants to escape the family legacy and with whom Jude has fallen in love. Seductive pacing and Reed's trademark glittering prose make this a chilling, satisfying exploration of art for art's sake vs. life for life's sake. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

About the Author

Kit Reed was born in San Diego CA and earned a BA from the College of Notre Dame of Maryland. In the ’50s she worked as a reporter for the St. Petersburg (Florida) Times and in Connecticut, for the New Haven Register, where she was twice named New England Newspaperwoman of the Year in 1958 and ’59. In 1974 she became an adjunct at Wesleyan University, where she ran fiction workshops, and is now Resident Writer there. Reed served on the board of the National Book Critics Circle from 1991-95. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1964, was the first American recipient of an international literary grant from the Abraham Woursell Foundation (1965), and has received numerous other awards and grants. In 1959 she was a Hugo Award finalist for best new author.

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