Amazon.com description: Product Description: From the author of Little Women comes a collection of gothic, romantic, and spellbinding tales guaranteed to surprise and delight.

This collection represents the best of Alcott's adult oeuvre, starting with ''A Modern Mephistopheles,'' a dark Faustian tale inspired by A Long Fatal Love Chase. The stories in this volume display dramatic intensity and thrilling, suspenseful plots that show Alcott to be a complex and passionate writer. Listeners will discover within this maelstrom of murder, deceit, obsessive desire, treachery, duplicity, and betrayal that love and honor can still conquer all.

The book takes its title from the tale ''A Whisper in the Dark,'' arguably Alcott's gothic masterpiece, a story of imperiled innocence. Also featured are ''The Abbot's Ghost,'' one of Alcott's few supernatural thrillers; ''Perilous Play,'' a sensationalist story in which she suggests that with the appropriate stimulation - in this case hashish - even the innocent reveal a dark side; and ''V. V.; or Plots and Counterplots,'' which introduces the mysterious Virginie Varens, the darkest heroine in all her work.