Eleanor Bourg Nicholson

When the amoral and cynical "J" takes up his pen to describe Magdalen Montague, he little realizes the dramatic changes that will soon be wrought in his life. His fascination for this mysterious woman catapults him into a harrowing encounter with Catholicism, conversion, and discipleship. Through the letters, intimate portraits of four souls appear: the loquacious letter-writer "J," his virulently antireligious recipient, "R," the weird, silent servant Domokos Juh sz, and Magdalen Montague herself. Across the turbulence of the first four decades of the twentieth century, including two world wars, the mysterious correspondents in The Letters of Magdalen Montague present a profound portrait of humanity's quest for God.

It is 1900, the dawn of a new century. Even as the old Queen's health fails, Victorian Britain stands monumental and strong upon a mountain of technological, scientific, and intellectual progress. For John Kemp, a straight-forward, unimaginative London lawyer, life seems reassuringly predictable yet forward-leaning, that is, until a foray into the recently published sensationalist novel Dracula, united with a chance meeting with an eccentric Dominican friar, catapults him into a bizarre, violent, and unsettling series of events. As London is transfixed with terror at a bloody trail of murder and destruction, Kemp finds himself in its midst, besieged on all sides--in his friendships, as those close to him fall prey to vicious assault by an unknown assassin; in his deep attraction to an unconventional American heiress; and in his own professional respectability, for who can trust a lawyer who sees things which, by all sane reason, cannot exist? Can his mundane, sensible life--and his skeptical mind--withstand vampires? Can this everyday Englishman survive his encounter with perhaps an even more sinister threat--the white-robed Papists who claim to be vampire slayers?