Successful author Molly Hunt, the adopted daughter of Long Island parents, is stunned when a handsome man she meets in her publisher’s office makes a startling declaration: that he is about to marry her twin sister. Molly soon discovers that she is actually the long-lost child of the wealthy Mountfort family of Charleston, South Carolina. Eager to solve the puzzle of her birth, Molly begins a fateful journey south.

At the historic family plantation, she meets her beautiful twin, Amelia, their reclusive mother, and a cast of intriguing yet disturbing characters who both question her identity and, in their way, confirm it. Nevertheless, her arrival has set in motion a series of strange and frightening events, and in the intoxicating, magnolia-scented world of Molly’s original family, haunting memories of an unsolved murder threaten the family’s very existence—as well as her own.

PHYLLIS A. WHITNEY is the winner of the Mystery Writers of America Grand Master Award for Lifetime Achievement.