During the fin-de-siecle, stories about hysterical women filled the air of Paris and the novels emerging during this era conveyed this hysteria and openly portrayed the symptoms of the women being treated at the Salpetiere. This book examines the emergence of hysterical discourse and its influence on women's writing, specifically focusing on the presentation of female sexuality in three different narratives.

The time is turn-of-the-century New York City. Society's elite host glittering balls inside sprawling mansions while outside, the teeming streets harbor secrets of their own. New York City's Police Commissioner Rick Bragg has been called upon to investigate a shocking crime. Reluctant to pull Francesca Cahill into a case that could be very dangerous, Rick also knows the beautiful and brilliant heiress has a natural ability for sleuthing that could aid him--even it if means working side by side with a woman who tempts him like no other. And so Franscesca and Rick begin a harrowing journey through the squalid underworld of the city that plunges them deeper and deeper in a peril neither could have imagined--and a desire that only continues to grow... Brenda Joyce's Deadly Desire is a sizzling hot historical romance.

BONUS: This edition contains an excerpt from Keri Arthur's Bound to Shadows. Seduction that kills. Pleasure to die for. She just can’t resist . . . Guardian Riley Jenson always seems to face the worst villains. And this time’s no different. For it’s no ordinary sorceress who can raise the dead to do her killing. But that’ s exactly what Riley expects to find at the end of a trail of female corpses used—and discarded—in a bizarre ritual of evil. With pressure mounting to catch one fiend, another series of brutal slayings shocks the vampire world of her lover, Quinn. So the last thing Riley needs is the heat of the upcoming full moon bringing her werewolf hormones to a boil—or the reappearance of a sexy bounty hunter, the rogue wolf Kye Murphy. Riley has threatened Murphy with arrest if he doesn’t back off the investigation, but it’s Riley who feels handcuffed by Kye’s lupine charm. Torn between her vamp and wolf natures, between her love for Quinn and her hots for Kye, Riley knows she’ s courting danger and indulging the deadliest desires. For her hunt through the supernatural underworld will bring her face-to-face with what lurks in a darkness where even monsters fear to tread.