Seven years after her extravagant public funeral, 20-year-old aristocrat Chene Viqar turns up at a highland border crossing dressed as a humble nomad. It's an instant headache for her ambitious Goddess Mother -- Rowene, the ruling Lady of Gwynyr -- and to further complicate matters, Chene carries no memory of her horrific abduction by revolutionaries from rich and rebellious Llyr Province.

Despite these enigmas, Chene pursues a legal career in her famous mother's footsteps. But when she's assigned to defend one of Lady Rowene's warrior monks in a Llyrian murder trial, the unsolved mystery of her teenage abduction makes her mere presence in the provincial capital a dangerous provocation. On the bright side, it's an open-and-shut case... if Chene can just overlook the mounting evidence that her doomed client's entire confession is nothing but a carefully constructed lie.

Chene, the first novel in D.C. McElroy's Goddess Daughter Trilogy and his larger series, The Darbas Cycle, is a slipstream fantasy epic about the limits of magic, power and principle, set in a world haunted by a mythic past both grand and dangerous.