Girls of Chequertrees

When sixteen-year-old Pamela Heath receives a mysterious letter from a fourth cousin she's never met, the invitation seems too strange to refuse. Emily Crabingway wants Pamela to housesit her grand estate, Chequertrees, for six months alongside three other girls, with only a handful of peculiar conditions: no visits from family, one postcard a month, and absolutely no entering the locked room on the first floor. Fifty pounds awaits anyone who obeys the rules. Pamela arrives expecting a quiet errand and finds something far more unsettling: a house that keeps secrets, a locked door that haunts the corridors, and questions about Emily Crabingway's true intentions that refuse to stay buried. What begins as a test of obedience becomes a test of courage, as Pamela must decide what she owes to curiosity and what she owes to trust. This is a deliciously old-fashioned mystery wrapped in the language of 1920s English propriety, where a locked door is an invitation and four young women discover that growing up means learning when to question the rules you're told to keep.