A Christmas Legacy
A Novel
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4.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Thomas and Charlotte Pitt’s former maid takes a new job as Christmas approaches—but not everyone in the household may survive the holidays in this tension-filled novel from bestselling author Anne Perry.
“Perry’s Victorian-era holiday mysteries [are] an annual treat.”—The Wall Street Journal
After leaving her position with Charlotte and Thomas Pitt to get married, Gracie thought her days as a maid were behind her. But when her good friend’s daughter, Millie, turns up on her doorstep just before the holidays, frantic because things are going missing from the kitchen in the household she serves, Gracie knows she has to find out what is happening. Millie, whose mother died years before, can’t risk being accused of theft and getting thrown out on the street, with no character references for a new position.
So Gracie takes on Millie’s job herself, claiming Millie is sick and needs a few days to recuperate. At first, it seems that all is normal in the household, even if the couple’s elderly granny keeps entirely to her bedroom upstairs. But Gracie begins to realize that Granny is suffering from neglect—and rather than helping her, the husband and wife have decided she isn’t dying fast enough.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
At the start of bestseller Perry's slight 19th Christmas mystery (after 2020's A Christmas Resolution), Gracie Tellman, a former servant to the author's best-known leads, Thomas and Charlotte Pitt, gets an unexpected visitor, Millie Foster. Millie, the teenage daughter of a woman Gracie and her London police inspector husband once cleared of a false charge of theft, has recently joined the household of the Harcourt family as a maid, but she's disturbed by a recent development. Some of the family's best food has begun to disappear, but none of the other staff acknowledges the apparent pilfering. Millie fears the thefts will come to the attention of her mistress, imperiling all the servants' jobs. Gracie agrees to help by telling Mr. and Mrs. Harcourt that Millie's taken ill and offering to fill in for her until her recovery. They accept her offer, giving Millie an opportunity to probe the puzzle of the missing food from the inside. The explanation is less than dramatic and sets up an ending not every reader will credit. This is strictly for devoted fans of Perry's various Pitt series.
