The story opens on a sunny day in the English countryside in 1953. The oldest of the family’s three daughters is hiding in her tree house. Her mother has gone back into the house to get a knife to cut a birthday cake for one of her other children. A man is slowing walking up the long drive. He reaches the mother and speaks a few words to her. Suddenly, she plunges the knife into the stranger.
Kate Morton has written a well crafted novel with all the pieces of the plot carefully laid out. It is not until almost the end of the story that everything falls into place. The reader travels back in time to London during the Blitz in the 1940s and then forward to present day. We meet four key characters there: Dorothy and her boyfriend Jimmy, and Vivien and her husband. Their lives intersect with one another and their relationships will lead to that eventful day in 1953. The other key character is Dorothy’s daughter, the girl in the tree house. Laurel Nicolson will unravel the mystery that surrounds her mother’s life and bring closure to the events that happened so long ago.
Part mystery and part romance, “The Secret Keeper” keeps the reader wondering what is the secret that haunts both Dorothy Nicolson and her daughter Laurel. I bet you won’t figure it out until the very last pages of “The Secret Keeper.”