THE HOUSEKEEPER’S SECRET
Duty, desire, and deception reside under one roof
Duty, desire, and deception reside under one roof.
Standing in the remote windswept moors of Northern England, Coldwell Hall is the perfect place to hide. For the past five years, Kate Furniss has maintained her professional mask so carefully that she almost believes she is the character she has created: Coldwell’s respectable housekeeper.
It is the summer of 1911 that brings new faces above and below the stairs of Coldwell Hall—including the handsome and mysterious new footman, Jem Arden. Just as the house’s shuttered rooms open, so does Kate’s guarded heart to a love affair that is as intense as it is forbidden.
Duty, desire, and deception reside under one roof.
Standing in the remote windswept moors of Northern England, Coldwell Hall is the perfect place to hide. For the past five years, Kate Furniss has maintained her professional mask so carefully that she almost believes she is the character she has created: Coldwell’s respectable housekeeper.
It is the summer of 1911 that brings new faces above and below the stairs of Coldwell Hall—including the handsome and mysterious new footman, Jem Arden. Just as the house’s shuttered rooms open, so does Kate’s guarded heart to a love affair that is as intense as it is forbidden. But Kate can feel her control slipping as Jem harbors secrets of his own.
Told in alternating timelines from the last sun-drenched summer of the Edwardian Age to the mud-filled trenches of WWI, The Housekeeper’s Secret opens its door to a world of romance, the truths we hold onto, and the past we must let go.
- St. Martin's Press
- Hardcover
- August 2024
- 368 Pages
- 9781250272621
Buy the Book
$29.00
About Iona Grey
Iona Grey has a degree in English Language and Literature from Manchester University, an obsession with history and an enduring fascination with the lives of women in the twentieth century. She has three grown up daughters, and lives in Cheshire with the husband she met on the last night of university, over thirty years ago. She is a firm believer in love at first sight and happy ever after.
Praise
“Downton Abbey gets a dark and delicious twist…haunting and heart-rending…Readers will breathlessly wait to learn the fates of Kate and Jem in this fabulous story.” —Bookpage (starred review)
“A fervent upstairs-downstairs drama…Grey’s insightful narrative sheds light on ways in which the war ‘jolted [Britain’s servant class] out of their ‘torpor,’ as one former Coldwell servant puts it, opening new opportunities for factory work and military service. This will keep readers turning the pages.” —Publishers Weekly
“Moving from the heartbreak and terror of the Western Front, to the closed, deeply atmospheric below stairs world of Coldwell Hall, this brilliantly researched and beautifully written novel had me captivated from the moment I read its intensely moving opening pages, not letting me go again until I tearfully turned the last. I rooted for Kate, fell completely in love with Jem, and will hold their unforgettable story close for a very long time to come.” —Jenny Ashcroft, author of Island in the East and The Officer and the Spy