The Secret Thread

A lavish summer party at a English country estate and a conflict between social classes lead to deadly consequences that won’t stay buried in this twisty, engrossing suspense novel by the author of The Midnight Hour.

2024: Thirty-year-old Olive Doyle lands a job working for Mimi Caswell, a wealthy society diva, style icon, and the legendary founder of a decorating empire. Olive is assigned to help Mimi, now in her seventies and newly widowed, with her plan to auction off her possessions—and tell the story of her early life through personal memorabilia. Famously private, Mimi’s past has always been shrouded in mystery. Olive doesn’t dare reveal how closely it touches her own.

Tasked with collecting the untold tales behind each auction lot, Olive lifts the lid on Mimi’s origin story—and it’s far darker than anyone knew.

1969: Mimi Bramley and her sister Pamela live in a cramped, damp estate cottage at Rushwood, an idyllic English country house owned by the Caswell family, their demanding new employer. The Bramley girls have been brought up with their hands in the soil. Now in their early twenties, they still work alongside their gardener parents. It’s a traditional, simple life—except that spirited Mimi hungers for more.

When the Caswells’ adult children—Nancy and the handsome Lawrence—arrive at Rushwood for the annual summer party, the sisters are drawn into their world, upsetting their own, and passions spark under the blazing sun. But a shattering death at the party causes a devastating rupture between Mimi and Pamela.

Now time is running out. Olive discovers there’s both a missing auction piece and a missing sister—and she’ll have to be the one to recover them, however dark the secret they expose and whatever the cost to herself.