The Corsican Woman

Book excerpt: Sybilia turned as if sleepwalking and, trance-like, walked down the stone steps to the living room. She shuddered as she took the rifle from the peg on the wall, but after only a moment's hesitation, she loaded it and went outside. Sybilia Rocca is beautiful, gentle and intelligent. But she is also Corsican and in her blood runs the intense passions of her race - the passions that drive her to shoot her father-in-law before stunned witnesses in the small square of the windswept town set high on a Corsican hillside. What is the terrible secret - the dark act of treachery twenty years before - that compels Sybilia to carry out her vendetta? Virtually everyone in the village knows, yet the unwritten law of their culture keeps them silenced. And now Sybilia is fighting for her life, gripped by a passion strong enough to destroy it...