The Corsican Woman — Madge Swindells

"I DID NOT MURDER XAVIER ROCCA. I EXECUTED HIM..."

With those compelling words begins the story of a people bound to an ancient and secretive code of honor -- and an extraordinary heroine driven to defy it. She is Sybilia Rocca, brought to an isolated Corsican village at sixteen and forced into marriage with Xavier Rocca's son. Now, one sultry August afternoon twenty years later, she walks into the village square and shoots her influential father-in-law to death. By the laws of Corsican vendetta, Sybilia must pay with her life.

But the Corsican woman is so beautiful and mysterious that a visiting American has made her his obsession. Soon Jock Walters will begin his own desperate fight to save her, following a trail of compulsion and desire back to World War II, to a love both tender and tragic, and to an act of betrayal more shocking and more terrible than anything this man can imagine ...