City Of Sin By Hattie Lee Johnston ~ 1896 HC 1st Edition. This edition is extremally rare to obtain. Overall condition is good with some spotting and a water stain on two pages around the title page.
A very long, very melodramatic neo-Gothic romance, mostly set in France, with imprisonment, many gruesome murders (including all the nuns in a convent murdered by poison), and genuine supernaturalism (Eastern mysticism, witches, lethal magic potions, mind-reading and more). The protagonist is a vengeful, evil woman, a murderess who acquires occult powers from a Middle Eastern witch. The male target of her plot to destroy him survives because he disavows his earlier cruel ways, finds God, and marries the heroine, a woman with a pure heart. Written throughout in feverish purple prose. Hattie Lee (Long) Johnston, a native of Kentucky and niece of General Albert Sidney Johnston (a Confederate military hero killed in action in 1862), was born in 1861 and died in Arlington, Texas in 1923. Not in Wright, American Fiction, 1876-1900.
422 pages