The baby, the police find when they get to the scene, is missing. An old-fashioned wicker crib hangs from a branch of the willow tree near them, but although Percy knows that Isabel, Mrs Turner, has just had a baby, he is so shocked, and so keen to get help, that he does not think to look in it. Isabel, Matilda (14), Evie (ten), and John (nine), however, are dead. Later, when he was asked about it, as he would be many times over the course of his long, long life, Percy Summers would say truthfully that he’d thought they were asleep. He is trespassing on The Station to get water for his old horse, when he sees Isabel and her children lying on a rug next to the waterhole: Just long enough for her to have some time to think.’Īlmost a year later, on Christmas Eve, 1959, a local man, Percy Summers, has just spent a hot, exhausting day helping to clear thick bush from a local property to prevent bushfires.

She has been feeling lonely and out-of-sorts recently and sometimes she imagines what it might be like if she could make them all disappear, ‘say for an hour, maybe a day – a week at the most. Isabel has lived in this house for 14 years, and she has the children (‘proper little Australians’) and her carefully planned and tended garden, to keep her busy, but Thomas is frequently away in London. It was unclear to Isabel exactly when she’d first started taking guilty pleasure in causing that small vertical frown line to appear between her husband’s brows. Always, he expected their picnics to take place where Edward Wentworth, the Victorian builder of their grand old stone house, had been photographed among ‘his similarly bearded’ friends, ‘arranged in elegant recliners’, under what had come to be known as ‘Mr Wentworth’s Cedar’. Isabel is perched precariously on the top rung of a wooden ladder, attempting to hang bunting in a part of the garden where she knows it will annoy her husband, Thomas. The Prologue, set in the Adelaide Hills on New Year’s Day 1959, introduces Isabel Turner, an Englishwoman living with her Australian family on a cattle property known locally as ‘The Station’. It is also, as the publisher’s blurb says, ‘A love letter to her home country’, Australia, marking the author’s return after years living in the UK.

Set in Sydney and the Adelaide Hills, Kate Morton’s new novel unwinds a mystery stretching across generations.Īnyone who has read Kate Morton’s earlier novels will know that she excels at setting the scene, creating interesting and likeable characters, leading you on until you are sure you have guessed the ‘secret’, then, in the end, proving that there is more to it than you ever imagined.

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