Gilded Heiress

The Gilded Heiress is Joanna Shupe's Anastasia-inspired historical romance, set among the mansions and street corners of 1880s Gilded Age New York City. In 1880, an infant was stolen from the Pendelton family, the wealthiest in America, and never recovered. Eighteen-year-old Josie Smith, a street singer raised in a children's asylum after being abandoned, has no idea her face is about to become a fortune. Con man Leo Hardy, seeking revenge against the family he blames for ruining his own father, decides to pass Josie off as the missing Pendelton heiress to claim the family's reward.

As the scheme pulls Josie into Gilded Age high society and forces her and Leo into each other's orbit, the plan's careful lies start to give way to real feeling, and the secrets both of them are keeping threaten to unravel everything before the truth about the kidnapping — and about each other — can come out.

Published by Avon, the novel is a standalone entry in Shupe's Gilded Age romance catalogue and does not require having read her other books first.