title: The Secret Keeper: A Novel
author:  Kate Morton 
description: Australian Mortons (The Distant Hours, 2010) latest will appeal to fans of Daphne du Maurier, Susanna Kearsley, and Audrey Niffenegger with its immensely relatable characters, passion, mystery, and twist ending. Laurel Nicholson is a teenager when she witnesses a shocking crime: her gentle, kind mother, Dorothy, kills a man. It becomes a family secret that Laurel never divulges or tries to fathom until five decades later, when Dorothy is on her deathbed, and Laurel finds a photograph of her mother with an old friend, snapped back in 1941, when Dorothy was barely out of her teens. As Laurel begins to dig, her burning questions become, Who was Vivien Jenkins, and why was she once so important to Dorothy? With the narrative shifting between Laurel, Dorothy, Vivien, and Jimmy, a man who also profoundly affected Dorothys life long ago, both reader and Laurel breathlessly hurtle into an astounding family secret that unfolds slowly and temptingly. Despite some loose threads and rather too leisurely pacing, this is likely to keep readers reading into the wee hours. --Julie Trevelyan
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  The Keeper of Secret Things
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  The Keeper of Secret Things
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  JAMIE CAMPBELL
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  “A secret’s worth depends on the people from whom it must be kept,”
  
  
  
  
  
  - Carlos Ruis Zafron
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Chapter 1
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  If there was a choice to be anywhere else in the world right now, I would
  choose Antarctica.
  
  
  Penguins didn’t talk.
  
  
  Unlike Isabelle McGreary. “So I totally stole the necklace. I mean, come on,
  it deserved to be on a beautiful neck and not sitting in some chain store. I
  did them a favor, really. When you think of it, now they don’t have to waste
  valuable counter space with a two-hundred-dollar necklace that nobody else
  deserved.”
  
  
  She flipped her hair away from her shoulders, revealing the necklace she had
  so callously stolen. I only wasted a second looking at it before turning back
  to my locker. Even my Physics book was more interesting than her prattle.
  
  
  “Don’t tell anyone,” Isabelle said, ending her confes