The Temptress: The Scandalous Life of Alice de Janze and the Mysterious Death of Lord Erroll

This is the fascinating life of femme fatale Alice de Janzé, a book that “may well have solved the mystery of Lord Erroll’s killing” (San Francisco Chronicle)—the story at the center of James Fox’s White Mischief.

A glamorous American multimillionairess, Alice de Janzé scandalized 1920s Paris when she left her aristocratic French husband for an English lover—whom she later tried to kill in a failed murder-suicide. Abandoning Paris for the moneyed British colonial society known as Kenya’s Happy Valley, she became the lover of womanizer Joss Hay, Lord Erroll. In 1941, Erroll was shot in his car on an isolated road. The crime remained unsolved.

Paul Spicer, whose mother was a confidante of Alice’s, uses personal letters and research to piece together what really happened that fateful evening. He brings to life an era of unimaginable wealth and indulgence, where jealousy and hidden passions brewed. At the heart of The Temptress is Alice, whose seductive charms no man could resist, and whose unfulfilled quest for love ended in her own suicide at age forty-two.