It’s no accident that the narrator of Carol LaHines’s second novel, The Vixen Amber Halloway, is a literature professor named Ophelia. That was also the name of a woman who had her heart broken and was driven to madness by the title character in Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
When we first meet LaHines’s Ophelia, she is being interviewed by a prison psychologist. Ophelia’s heart has been broken, too, and it is evident that it has led her to do something terrible. Her field of study, we soon learn, was Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, a 14th century narrative poem about the horrifying wages of sin.