Mothers and Daughters Keep Each Other's Secrets

Orla and Maeve run a small guesthouse on the Irish coast. They are known for brown bread, sea views, and the sad, tidy story of a father who drowned saving another man. It's a good story. It has held for twenty years. Then an off-season guest arrives and asks for room four — the room Orla's father slept in before he died. He asks too few questions to be a tourist and too many to be a friend. And when Orla starts looking into him, she finds a cellar her mother has kept locked, two ledgers she has never been allowed to open, and a photograph of her father standing on a pier with three men who are not from this town. Her mother has been paying a family in Cardiff, quietly, every month, for as long as Orla can remember. An absolutely addictive psychological thriller with a shocking twist.