Kate Morton

During a party at the family farm in the English countryside, sixteen-year-old Laurel Nicolson has escaped to her childhood tree house and is dreaming of the future. She spies a stranger coming up the road and sees her mother speak to him. Before the afternoon is over, Laurel will witness a shocking crime that challenges everything she knows about her family and especially her mother, Dorothy. Now, fifty years later, Laurel is a successful and well-regarded...

"A suspenseful novel involving a mystery writer whose family was devastated when she was sixteen when her infant brother disappeared without a trace. Decades later a young detective from London stumbles upon the ruins of the family's lakeside estate in Cornwall and begins digging into the unsolved case"-- On a family's idyllic lakeside estate in Cornwall, England, after a beautiful party drawing hundreds of guests to the estate has ended, the Edevanes...

On her 21st birthday, a young woman who was abandoned on a ship headed for Australia when she was a small child, is told the truth by her adoptive parents. She heads back to England -- and Cornwall -- to discover the rest of her past.