This story of Faustian bargains happened in Paris in the 1950s. Using any means necessary to get to the top with her talent, Kathleen Ingersoll reached the far edge of possibility as a classical pianist. With the higher music establishment in the background, her story is neither about music nor about Paris. It is about a woman and the cost of extreme ambition, about love and other dangers, and about time and the river.

Events on streets and in neighborhoods that were never in Paris are in this book the same way that Poe's murders happened in the Rue Morgue. Persons who existed...