The Brides of Aberdar by Christianna Brand

A governess comes to Wales to work in a house with a ghostly past

For four hundred years, the squires of Aberdar have lorded over this gloomy patch of Wales. In Elizabethan times, the house burst with life, love, and intrigue, as gentlemen schemed endlessly in the shadow of the Virgin Queen’s court. But now the house is dark, populated only by two darling twins, their ghastly Belgian aunt, and their father, whose grief for their departed mother is too powerful to bear.

Into this grim environment steps Miss Alys Tetterman, a bright young governess with a disfiguring scar and secrets of her own. As she undertakes the education of the girls, she learns there is a long history of twins at Aberdar manor—and of brides dying young. There is one lesson Miss Tetterman should learn herself: Run.

“You have to reach for the greatest of Great Names to find Brand’s rivals in the subtleties of the trade.” —New York Times

“One of the great masters of English detective fiction.” —Francis M. Nevins, author of Cornell Woolrich

“[Brand] was ready to jig endlessly with her pieces, to reject and replace until there was not a single gap that her reader would detect.” —H.R.F. Keating, author of Crime & Mystery: The 100 Best Books