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 setbacks, Chene follows her famous mother's footsteps into a promising legal career. But when she's assigned to defend one of Lady Rowene's warrior monks in a Llyrian murder trial, the unsolved mystery of Chene's teenage abduction makes her mere presence in the provincial capital a dangerous provocation. On the bright side, at least it's an open-and-shut case... if Chene can just overlook the mounting evidence that her doomed client's entire confession is 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 epic fantasy about the limits of magic, power and principle, set in a world haunted by a past too grand for mundane imagination.