What the critics are saying:

From the Boston Globe:

Laura Dietz's marvelous "In the Tenth House" invites readers into some of the odder corners of the Victorian era with a gothic plot involving spiritualism, psychiatry, fraud, greed, obsession, repressed sexuality and madness. Dietz smoothly integrates what must have been an enormous amount of research, telling an enthralling, intricate story rich in atmosphere and historical detail.

Dr. Ambrose Gennett is a well-to-do young psychiatrist, one of the few followers of Sigmund Freud's new theories practicing in London. He pauses on a train platform one morning to help an attractive young stranger after she suffers an accidental blow to the head. She seems to recognize him, saying, "This is what comes of lying to your mother." She is talking about herself, but Ambrose is convinced, for good reason, that the remark is aimed at him. She blurts out a few more sentences that seem startlingly relevant to his life, then turns and disappears.

Ambrose convinces himself that he only wants to help her and becomes obsessed with tracking her down. He soon discovers that Lily Embry is something he, a man of science, particularly despises, a spiritualist medium. She helps her mother, Carola, perform seances for clients who want to communicate with the dead. Lily agrees that spiritualism is a fraud, but she believes that she possesses true psychic gifts. The Tarot cards tell her that Ambrose has been sent to help her. Why else would he have given her his calling card? Her mother has fallen ill and they are desperate for money. Gennett's half sister and her aunt are enthusiastic believers in spiritualism, and Lily arranges a seance at the Gennett family home, with disastrous results.

Ambrose, furious that Lily has dared to dupe his relations, becomes almost insanely fixated on exposing spiritualism, and Lily in particular, as a fraud. Lily, faced with mounting debts, teams up with Monsieur St. Aubin, a con man with access to wealthy clients. This stew of sex, spirituality, and madness reaches a boiling point -- more of an explosion, actually -- during a seance at a country estate.