A tale with a hundred secrets is what Jacqueline Friedland writes the best. The writer shows the master talent of pen in this story when two strangers meet and they start learning different things about one another slowly and the more they come to know about the hidden secrets the more they are attracted toward one another. The story opens with an introduction of a middle class family in Great Britain trying to hold things together as the family found itself under the burden of a debt they cannot pay.
Abby is forced to go and settle in America in the state of Douglas Elling who is in appearance a silent sort of a man and that was of course obvious as he was a widower. Abigail nicknamed Abby enters the mansion when she was 17 and it takes her a while to understand that the one who is helping her possesses some hidden agendas of life as well.
Douglas represents the group of people who were helping the slaves in the time when slavery was a common thing in America and the aristocrats were always there to make the people pay who wanted to abolish slaver.
The book is full of heroic scenes but not in the beginning also the era of the civil war is described in complete detail and the historical setting is so picture perfect that we can imagine the whole scenes. Narration by Kirsten Potter makes us listen to the novel in a single go because of the captivating way of uttering the story in British and American accent. The places and their names that are used are all real which means that the writer has done quite a research.