MILADY

Hours from her execution, Milady de Winter recounts her youth and the tragic events that turned her from an innocent girl into the cunning and ruthless enemy of The Three Musketeers.

One of France's top spies, Milady de Winter is a lethal combination of beauty and brains. She can seduce any man, poison any enemy, but behind a façade of dangerous duplicity beats an honorable heart--and a secret that makes her vulnerable to the machinations of the man who controls her, the powerful Cardinal Richelieu.

Milady knows that death is her only escape from her servitude to Richelieu and to her country. When she's sent on a mission to seduce a notorious English nobleman, and encounters D'Artagnan and the Three Musketeers--one of whom has his own reasons for wanting her dead--she sets in motion a series of events that seem to lead to her own downfall.

From escaping a brutal French convent to finding herself in the bed of a Musketeer, from a humble Yorkshire past to the licentious court of King James, Milady survives by her wits and wiles to become one of literature's most notorious female villains.

This historical fiction debut chronicles the life of Milady de Winter. Since the publication of Alexandre Dumas'sThe Three Musketeersin 1844, Milady has reigned as one of the great female villains of literature. Cunning, remorseless and ruthlessly vindictive, she moves throughout Dumas's epic novel with such a coldblooded evil that the reader assumes it's in her nature. Now, the real story can be told.


Laura Sullivan is the author of five books for middle grade and young adult audiences. She collaborated with producer, director and former So You Think You Can Dance judge Adam Shankman on Girl About Town (Atheneum, May, 2016), a Nick and Nora-styled mystery set in 1930s Hollywood and the sequel. She also worked with YouTube star Joey Graceffa on his recent #1 New York Times bestseller Children of Eden (Atria/Keywords, Oct 2016). This is her debut adult novel.