Henry Rathbone and Clara Harris were engaged to be married, when they were invited to share the Presidential box with the Lincolns at Ford's Theater on the evening of Good Friday, 1865. When John Wilkes Booth crept into the box, the young couple became witnesses to a central tragedy in American history.

But Lincoln's assassination is only one part of this novel--for in researching the lives of Henry and Clara Rathbone, Mallon uncovered an even more dramatic story of passion, scandal, heroism, murder, and madness. Imaginatively re-creating their lives, he tells the larger story of nineteenth-century Victorian America: a society structured above suppressed impulses and undercurrents that grew stronger as the century progressed.