"But you can't marry me! You are—Jeremy Porter—a rich man and a lawyer, and I am only a servant girl!" So says Ellen Watson, a beautiful but dreadfully downtrodden housemaid in turn-of-the-century Pennsylvania. Ellen is actually the illegitimate daughter of one of Philadelphia's first families, but this doesn't matter to Jeremy one way or another. He marries Cinder-Ellen when she is 17, and their life together, according to Taylor Caldwell, becomes a microcosm of the American apocalypse….

Caldwell's ["Ceremony of The Innocent"] finds her at the top of her form as a storyteller and as a vendor of the ideas that have surfaced in her novels since "Dynasty of Death." The story is pure melodrama, rich in characters you love to hate. And the ideology, in the light of the current conspiracy explosion, is beginning to seem less exotic.

Martin Levin, in his review of "Ceremony of...