Heroes and Lovers

It is the early 1900s. Viola Lambert is a rebellious New York society beauty turned scientist, feminist, and suffragette. Byron Tremaine is America's most famous and intrepid polar explorer, a man's man as the leader of daring expeditions, a woman's dream as a lover. Together they join in a searing affair that neither of them can resist or control, even as they challenge each other in a mounting competition through the murderous landscape of the Antarctic.

Over seven decades later, in the 1990s, Byron Tremaine's lovely great-granddaughter Beatrix searches for the elusive truth about the idolized man whose heroic image serves as a model for her own choice in men.and about the disturbing woman whose life and death are shrouded in secrets. Only in this way will she be able to save the great Byron Tremaine's memory from desecration at the hands of an investigative journalist. Steven Avery's aggressive probings for his television documentary threaten to expose her family's past in a scandalous manner, and that stirs Beatrix to rage even as Steven Avery's physical presence ignites unsettling physical desire.

These are the twin poles of an extraordinary story that is at once a gripping historical saga, fascinating exploration of sexuality, and a tantalizing mystery. Sweeping through the mists of time and place--from the vanished era of old New York society to the slums of London to the frozen world of the Antarctic to the present--Heroes and Lovers focuses on the dark secret that drives two intense, spirited women, who live decades apart, toward their separate yet hauntingly intertwined destinies. With stirring insights into the golden age of Antarctic exploration, and passionate yearnings that transcend time, Lucy Kavaler takes her place beside such masters of social milieu and complex emotional interplay as Daphne du Maurier and Susan Howatch, even as she creates a superbly entertaining novel that is uniquely her own.