The Shadow Sister

Star D'Aplièse is adrift after the sudden death of her adoptive father, a elusive billionaire known to his six daughters as Pa Salt. He adopted each of them from a different corner of the world, and before he died he left every daughter a clue to her origins. Star's clue points to an antiquarian bookshop in London.

A hundred years earlier, Flora MacNichol is headstrong, independent and certain she will never marry. She lives happily in England's Lake District, close to her childhood idol Beatrix Potter. Then circumstances take her to London, into the household of Alice Keppel, one of Edwardian England's most notorious society hostesses.

There Flora becomes a pawn in a larger game and has to choose between passionate love and loyalty to her family. A meeting with a mysterious gentleman may bring the answers she has long been looking for.

The novel is a dual timeline story, moving between Star's present day and Flora's Edwardian world. As Star follows Flora's story, it leads her into her own past, and the more she learns, the more she questions who she is and where she belongs. It is a family mystery with a historical romance at its center, and it reads as an unfolding search for identity.