When Janice Gale takes a position as housekeeper at the remote estate called The Pines, she expects a quiet life. Instead, she finds a household trembling with secrets. The boy's nightmares turn to stone-cold death. Former servants fled in terror. And everywhere lurks the red lady: a spectral figure with Janice's own face, appearing at windows and in dreams. Between stolen Russian jewels hidden somewhere in the house, trap doors that open into darkness, and the dangerously magnetic Paul Dabney whose explanations never quite add up, Janice is caught in a web where nothing is what it seems. The supernatural and the criminal intertwine, and the red lady may be the least of her problems. This is gothic mystery at its early twentieth-century best: moody, suspenseful, and underpinned by a creeping question about identity and the face we wear.
