Goddess of Love

Some inheritances you can't refuse. Some killers you can't outrun. Some passions you can't bury.

Washington, D.C., September 1964.

Judy Nightingale and Philippa Dolittle, née Watson, were once each other's whole world. They haven't spoken in years. Then Judy's latest novel, The Savage Kind, drags their shared past into public view and forces an uneasy reunion.

Then comes the shock: Judy's estranged birth mother—the woman who once tried to poison them both—has died, leaving her everything. A house. A fortune. A staff that watches too closely. Soon after, letters begin arriving, each signed "Mother" and enclosing pages from Judy's long-lost radio play, "Frankenstein's Sister." Warnings of revenge from beyond the grave.

The warnings turn real. After a dinner party thick with old grievances, a guest is dead, and Judy's Mercedes is found in a ravine, its brake line cut. Judy is the intended victim.

She turns to the only person who ever truly understood her: Philippa, now married with a child, her past buried beneath a life she has worked hard not to examine. Together they follow the letters back toward everything they never resolved and toward a killer who has been patient for a very long time . . . and still writing letters.

Goddess of Love concludes John Copenhaver's Nightingale Trilogy, following Hall of Mirrors, a New York Times Best Crime Novel of 2024.

Queer, suspenseful, and deeply seductive, this is a murder mystery where love is both the most powerful weapon—and the deadliest risk.