Book excerpt: An Inconvenient Wife is a rich blend of suspense, social history (America in the 1880s), and passion. Chance delivers a powerfully written page-turner about a woman's struggle to escape the confines of her time, class, and gender. Literary historical fiction is an extremely popular genre, as demonstrated by such bestsellers as Matthew Pearl's AThe Dante Club and Michael Faber's The Crimson Petal and the White. Megan Chance is the author of Susannah Morrow, which captured the extraordinary drama of the Salem witch trials; as well as the historical romance novels A Season in Eden, The Gentleman Caller, The Way Home, and Fall from Grace.