Prima Donna » (Original)

Opera singer Sabine Conrad is the toast of nineteenth-century New York high society. A celebrated soprano with the voice of an angel, she is showered with adulation by her audiences and courted by wealthy patrons. But behind the scenes, her every move is controlled by a Svengali-like manager, Gideon Price. When her attempt to escape him goes tragically awry, she flees, leaving behind a grisly murder.

Three years later, as Marguerite Olson, she has put aside the prima donna she once was to run a low-class theater in Seattle. Hidden among prostitutes, drunks, and miners, a desperate and determined Marguerite carefully guards the secrets of her old life—until her past returns to offer a terrifying proposition.  

Prima Donna captures both the glittering decadence of New York and the rough raunchy waterfront of Seattle, as Marguerite, caught between two worlds, must find the strength to confront the truth of her past and choose which voice defines her in this dark and harrowing novel.

Publishers Weekly

At the start of Chance's heady if at times overheated Victorian historical, Sabine Conrad, an ambitious opera singer wounded in a violent encounter whose significance doesn't become clear until later, flees New York City with her jewels. Months later, in February 1878, the by now penniless Sabine reaches Seattle, Washington Territory, where she gets a job as a scrubwoman at the Palace, a whore house that provides musical entertainment in the frontier city's red-light district. Sabine, who's adopted the name Margie Olson, helps the Palace's proprietor, Johnny Langford, realize his dream of turning the place into a legitimate theater. Chance (The Spiritualist) deftly explores the hardships the former prima donna endures overseeing Langford's entertainers, even as Sabine yearns to return to the stage herself. Melodramatic excerpts from Sabine's youthful journal chronicling her opera career provide counterpoint in an erotic thriller full of lively period detail. (Jan.)