Almost Innocent — Sheila Bosworth

Sheila Bosworth's enthralling debut novel is a vibrant, heartrending story of love and loss set in “the City That Care Forgot”
 
Constance Alexander and Rand Calvert fall in love on Mardi Gras night. She is eighteen years old, the beautiful, privileged daughter of a Louisiana Supreme Court justice. He is a dashing young artist, the son of a family “long on name but short on money.” Their desire for each other is intense and irresistible, and when they marry and move into a shabby old house on Camp Street, it is the beginning of a lifetime of happiness together -- or so they hope.
 
Decades later, Clay-Lee Calvert seeks the truth about her parents' turbulent romance: their passionate courtship, the resentments created by their impoverished lifestyle, the fatally disruptive influence of Rand's rich, manipulative, and unscrupulous uncle. Clay-Lee also seeks to come to terms with her own role in the tragic events which brought an end to the love story of Rand and Constance, events which have cast a long, dark shadow over her life.
 
A masterful tale of enchantment and anguish in the grand tradition of Southern literature, Almost Innocent sublimely captures the enigmatic allure of New Orleans in the 1950s.