They say elderly women and young girls are the two most invisible creatures on earth. Which makes them the perfect disguise.
At eighty-three, Vera Hawthorne asks for nothing more than a quiet existence in her secluded herb garden in Rowan Mews—tending chamomile, distilling tinctures, and playing the eccentric, harmless old widow. But beneath her dirt-stained fingernails and frail frame lies an earth-shattering secret hidden for sixty-seven years: she was once Sybil Sterling, famously branded by sensationalist tabloids as "Mad Sybil", the youngest child in the nation’s history ever convicted of a gruesome murder.
When an anonymous extortion letter lands on her doorstep, the sanctuary she built from thin air begins to fracture. A relentless homicide detective moves in nearby with an unblinking gaze; a venomous neighbor watches her every move behind dusty velvet curtains; and deep within her fractured psyche, Rory—the ferocious, axe-wielding alter she locked away decades ago—is clawing at the bars to get out.
Can a wounded soul outrun the sins of a gilded dynasty, or will the soil demand blood once again?
A breathtaking symphony of domestic suspense, ancestral terror, and the miraculous, oxygen-like power of human devotion.