The Spring of the Tiger — Victoria Holt

When Sarah Ashington's actress mother dies after a devastating scandal, Sarah is left at her long-lost father's rambling, ancestral estate, to face the disturbinbg questions of her own past. Then her father's death draws her to his Ceylon plantation -- into the shadows of his strangely beckoning life, into a marriage of thwarted passion and danger -- and finally into a legend from which there may be no return...