All are welcome to attend the Reading on the Avenue Book Club, which meets in the Community Room of Willow Glen Library. On Wednesday, January 22, we'll be discussing Captive of the Labyrinth: Sarah L. Winchester, Heiress to the Rifle Fortune by Mary Jo Ignoffo.

After inheriting a vast fortune upon the death of her husband in 1881, Sarah Winchester purchased a simple farmhouse in San Jose, California. She began building additions to the house and continued construction on it for the next 20 years. A hostile press cast Sarah as the conscience of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company—a widow shouldering responsibility for the many deaths caused by the rifle that brought her riches. She was accused of being a ghost-obsessed spiritualist, and to this day it is largely believed that the extensive construction she executed on her San Jose house was done to appease the ghouls around her.

But was she really as guilt-ridden and superstitious as history remembers her? In the first full-length biography of Winchester, author and historian Mary Jo Ignoffo unearths the truth about this notorious eccentric, revealing that she was not a maddened spiritualist driven by remorse but an intelligent, articulate woman who sought to protect her private life amidst the chaos of her public existence.