The Secret Thread

A lavish summer party at an English country estate and 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.

Even the darkest secrets unravel in time . . .

2024: Thirty-year-old Jo O’Mara lands a job working for Mimi Mott, a wealthy style icon and legendary founder of a decorating empire. Newly widowed and in her seventies, Mimi is preparing to auction off her possessions and, through them, finally tell the story of her early life. Famously private, until now Mimi has kept her past shrouded in mystery. Jo doesn’t dare reveal how closely it touches her own.

Tasked with collecting the untold tales behind each auction lot, Jo peels back the layers of Mimi’s origin story and discovers it’s far darker than anyone ever suspected.

1969: Mimi and her sister Pamela live in a cramped, damp staff cottage on the grounds of Rushwood, an idyllic English country estate owned by the Caswell family, their demanding new employer. Working alongside their gardener parents, the girls have been raised with their hands in the soil and know only a traditional, simple life—except spirited Mimi hungers for more.

When the Caswells’ adult children, Nancy and the handsome Lawrence, arrive at Rushwood for the summer, the sisters are drawn into their privileged, intoxicating world, unsettling their own, and passions spark under the blazing sun—until a shattering death at Rushwood’s society party tears Mimi and Pamela apart.

Now time is running out. Jo discovers there’s both a missing auction piece and a missing sister and vows to find them, no matter how dark the secret they expose or the cost to herself.