All Along the River

A young wife in a Cornish valley is drawn into a friendship her husband has forbidden, and a death follows that the coroner explains too easily. Mary Braddon wrote eighty novels after "Lady Audley's Secret" and never lost the sensation writer's grip on a secret. The river and the tides do a good deal of the plotting. Fifty-seven plates, from Constable's river views to Stanhope Forbes's Cornish scenes, run alongside the tale of a marriage and a death the tides keep half-hidden.