"The house cleaner of a famous author must carry out her employer's shocking last wish in this delightful new novel from beloved author Phaedra Patrick Mother of two Liv Green barely scrapes by as a maid to make ends meet, often finding escape in a good book while daydreaming of becoming a writer herself. So she can't believe her luck when she lands a job housekeeping for her personal hero, megabestselling author Essie Starling, a mysterious and intimidating...

“Welcome to the family,” Nina Winchester says as I shake her elegant, manicured hand. I smile politely, gazing around the marble hallway. Working here is my last chance to start fresh. I can pretend to be whoever I like. But I’ll soon learn that the Winchesters’ secrets are far more dangerous than my own… Every day I clean the Winchesters’ beautiful house top to bottom. I collect their daughter from school. And I cook a delicious meal...

Fourteen-year-old Joan Skraggs, just like the heroines in her beloved novels, yearns for real life and true love. But what hope is there for adventure, beauty, or art on a hardscrabble farm in Pennsylvania where the work never ends? Over the summer of 1911, Joan pours her heart out into her diary as she seeks a new, better life for herself -- because maybe, just maybe, a hired girl cleaning and cooking for six dollars a week can become what a farm...

"Ever since Fern could remember, she and her mother have lived as servants in Wyndemere House, the old gothic mansion of the Davenport family. She may have been a servant, but Fern developed a sweet friendship with Dr. Davenport's son, Ryder, and she was even allowed free range of the estate. But Dr. Davenport has remarried and his new wife has very different ideas about a servant's place. Now Fern and her mother are subject to cruel punishments,...

Mariella Bennet, struggling to support her family in Depression-era Key West, takes a job as a maid for Ernest Hemingway's second wife, and becomes caught up in a world of parties, celebrities, and the attentions of Papa himself.

Through a hard turn of events, Reese Thackery has become an indentured servant. When the owner of her contract dies, the bank has rights to her fate. Conner Kingsley, the son of the bank's owner, comes to Tucker Mills to investigate and soon releases Reese from obligation and hires her to keep house for him. Reese is grateful for freedom but unsure of her other feelings for Conner. Yet, as her emotional hurts heal, and her faith blossoms, Reese allows...

"From her place in the store that sells artificial friends, Klara--an artificial friend with outstanding observational qualities--watches carefully the behavior of those who come in to browse, and of those who pass in the street outside. She remains hopeful a customer will soon choose her, but when the possibility emerges that her circumstances may change forever, Klara she is warned not to invest too much in the promises of humans. In this luminous...

"Delia Sweeney has always been unlike her older sister-- fair and delicate compared to tall, statuesque Nora, whose hair is as dark as Donegal turf. In other ways too, the sisters are leagues apart. Nora is her mother's darling, favored at every turn, and expected to marry into wealth. Delia, constantly slighted, finds a measure of happiness helping her da on the farm. The rest of the time, she reads about far-off places that seem sure to remain a...

"Old sins cast long shadows. Normally dead bodies in a graveyard are buried--but not this one. When a woman is found strangled in a North London cemetery with an old newspaper clipping clutched in her hand, Inspector Witherspoon is surprised to find that he and the victim have crossed paths before. Mrs. Robinson was a respectable widow who ran a quiet Islington lodging house. None of her lodgers have any apparent motive to murder their landlady. But...