by Fergus Hume
Lady Jim and her husband are a reprehensible pair. Their extravagance led to continual, mounting debt which turned them into aristocratic swindlers. Lady Jim is intelligent, beautiful, selfish, vain, and greedy. She's practically the perfect antihero except for occasional flashes of conscience, which usually are smothered by her baser instincts. After reading The Moonstone, Lady Jim comes up with a plot to fake her husband's death and claim his life insurance money. As her husband points out, the flaw in her plan is that the Moonstone's author can plan details just how he likes while they are left to the vagaries of real life. The plot soon gets very complicated and the reader is left in awe of the author's ability to twist and twist and twist the story as Lady Jim continually manipulates everyone around her.
I enjoy this sort of old story anyway but this one reached unexpected depths because of the occasional attempts of a minister to get Lady Jim to see spiritual reality. I took this as just part of the social setting and story until the end of the book where the plot takes really surprising turns and this element suddenly became very important.
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