In 1860, twenty-year-old Lavinia Huntington is transported from her Irish village to start a new life in Mayfair, London, as the wife of a gentleman anthropologist thirty years her senior. One year later she is standing trial for his murder. In modern-day Los Angeles, forty-year-old Professor Julia Huntington, geneticist, returns from a field trip to Afghanistan. She has received a prestigious commission from the US Defense Department to research a genetic propensity to kill without remorse. Soul is a story of two women, across two eras, and their struggle with obsessive love and revenge. Part murder mystery, part psychological thriller, part commentary on genetics and human behaviour, sexual jealousy and betrayal, it is both provocative and unputdownable. (Backcover)