Moon Rising

A passionate affair between Damaris Sterne, an orphaned fishergirl living in the English seaside village of Whitby, and Bram Stoker, future author of Dracula, married and 20 years her senior, is the focus of Roberts's (Louisa Elliott) atmospheric, well-researched historical romance. The story opens with a chance reunion of the couple two decades after their affair. The once impoverished young girl, now named Marie Lindsey, has become successful in the male-dominated world of shipping and is a wealthy widow; Stoker, longtime business manager to the era's eminent Shakespearean actor, is old and frailDhis fame as a novelist won't come until much later. He and ""Damsy"" met during a lethal gale that inspired the storm in Dracula. She lived with her cousin Bella, and the girls hawked fish; enterprising and feisty, Damsy also posed for photographs sold as picture-cards to tourists. The cousins' lives diverged when Bella, victimized by incest, was driven to prostitution, whereas Damsy matured during her passionate liaison with Stoker, to whom she confided local legends. Subsequently, she survived a botched abortion, dropped ""old-fashioned"" Damaris for a more fashionable name and obtained a job as companion to the elderly matron of a shipping family, acquiring a knowledge of trade that led to marriage, a career and good fortuneDalthough she did not escape treachery and sorrow along the way. As a rags-to-riches heroine, her mindset and self-assurance are ahead of their time, but this gothic romance offers the dramatic thrills and titillating sex common to the genre and adds the cachet of imagining the source of Stoker's classic. It's a cut well above similar novels. (Jan. 19)