A little bit about The Countess, coming this October to a bookstore or e-reader near you:
In January 1611 one of the highest-born members of the Hungarian nobility, Countess Erzsebet Bathory, was walled inside her castle tower and imprisoned for the rest of her life. Her servants were taken away, tortured, put on trial, and then executed as accomplices to the countess’s crimes: the torture and murder of at least 35 women and girls, mostly servants in the countess’s employ. Erzsebet Bathory herself spent the next three and a half years in her tiny prison, denied every comfort, forbidden even to look at the world outside her windows.
THE COUNTESS re-creates Bathory’s story in her own words: how this daughter of a noble family was betrothed at age ten but rebelled by bearing an illegitimate child; how she was forced to give that child away and marry Count Nadasdy, a man more interested in the battlefield than the bedroom; how she resorted to spells and potions to give him a child after ten years of marriage; how after the count’s death she loved the man who would eventually imprison her; and how she eventually turned to the torture and murder of her servants after he rejected her. THE COUNTESS is an intimate, sympathetic, and ultimately disturbing portrait of one of the most reviled women in history.