From the author of The Girl with the Pendant Pearl and Twice Melvin, comes James Pumpelly's latest novel, Lord Byron's Ring. Excruciatingly intense and seasoned with mystery, romance and action, Lord Byron's Ring is dream haunting, running the gamut from dystopic to paradisical, a metaphysical thriller that keeps you turning pages.

Devoted wife and mother, degreed historian and devotee of Byron, Sara Burden is her husband's heroine; Jack the only man who leaves her breathless. Their scholarly and popular teenage son, Drew, completes the idyllic family. Revered and envied in the Oklahoma badlands town their mansion overlooks, the Burden's love affair is both lusty and lush, explicit and ethereal, their union seemingly impervious to life's entrapments. But while vacationing in Salzburg, Austria, their fortune reverses when a blackmailing businessman, with enemies to spare, swoops down from the Panhandle oil fields to threaten Jack's drilling ventures, only to turn up dead. Motives of revenge and greed darken the plot, reasons which soon lead Drew into the path of murder - and to a medium who conjures Lord Byron's ghost.

Jack Burden is a compassionate man, drawn to the unfortunates by his impoverished youth. Sara is his candle in the window, a beautiful woman discovering the potential of her sexuality in this graphic, lyrical bonding of two disparate hearts. The author leads us into the extraordinary, imaginative dimensions of the family's intimacies, a family bound by a desperate need - and a dreadful secret - in this suspenseful, hypnotically readable novel about murder, madness, power, love, spirit mediums, and the hypocrisy of religious dogmas.

Pumpelly's contrapuntal theme is at once a rigadoon of rascality and a paean of passion, his exquisitely defined characters giving impetus to the big question, one not answered until the closing scene. Ingenious, intellectually exciting and shocking, Lord Byron's Ring is a powerful portrait of family, faith and fortune fusing like Roman candles over the shadowlands of failure. A riveting provocation of the improbable you can't put out of your mind.