LaLaurie: A Novel of the Infamous Madame of New Orleans (Ladies of Darkness Book 2)

In June of 1800, Delphine Macarty stands at the rail of St. Louis Cathedral in a dress let out twice and a face she has been told not to let the room see frightened. Two hundred people decide who she will be. She is thirteen. The man beside her is a Spanish officer old enough to have waited for smaller things and gotten them.

What follows is not a legend. It is a life built in the correct order: a death in Havana, a child buried at sea, a second marriage she almost allows herself to want, a third that gives her a name over a door and a lot at Royal and Hospital that is, for the first time, hers. She becomes the woman the Quarter watches. She runs a house that is kinder by candlelight than by day. She teaches her daughter the small economies of a compliment given and a question left unasked.

Behind the receiving line there is a locked door, a cook who has learned how little of herself a room can be shown, a magistrate who drinks nothing and forgets nothing, and a neighbor at a window who has been waiting for a mistake large enough to use.

The Art of Being Seen is a novel of Delphine LaLaurie — not the carnival monster New Orleans made of her, and not the excuse she spent a lifetime rehearsing, but the woman who believed that if nothing was seen, nothing had happened.

For readers of Margaret Atwood, Hannah Kent, and Sara Collins. A literary historical novel of power, motherhood, and the stories a city agrees to tell instead of the ones it cannot bear to keep.