Teresa Crane’s new novel The Bad Seed – the first Charlotte Pettifer novel - is a tale set against the apparently serene and conventional backdrop of English country society after Trafalgar and before the sudden onslaught of the Peninsular War. It is a tale of secrets; of murders and of treachery. The tale of an orphaned child and her wilful, self-confessed patricide brother. Of the dark consequences of obsession, and of how secrets and lies, unsuspected and long concealed, can, at a stroke, change a life irrevocably. A tale of corrupted innocence and of the deepest of betrayals. And of the determination and courage that it takes to overcome them.