The De Maury Papers — Isabelle Holland

To Janet deMaury it seemed an interesting but uncomplicated assignment, to write her famous father's biography. After all, as her publisher pointed out, she was the obvious person to do it. But before she could begin, she had to travel to Tenton Hall in England, where her father's papers were stored in the keeping of Sir Gideon Lightwood, hostile and enigmatic husband of Janet's late cousin, Rosemary.

When Janet informs Sir Gideon that she proposed to look through the boxes containing the correspondence of her father and of the political society her founded, she is made almost immediately to feel that those papers, relics of a utopian group that had flourished before and after World War II and then all but disappeared must hold some secret.

Sir Gideon reports that the papers were once vandalized and scattered all over the mansion's attic, and were restored to the boxes without order. Janet receives a mysterious note telling her to leave for her own safety. Her dog disappears. She and Sir Gideon, out driving, suffer a strange accident. And when the papers are finally put into sequence, it becomes plain that certain of them, vital to the understanding of the remainder are missing.

Bewildered, Janet begins to put together the fragments of a well-kept secret, and learns with mounting horror that not only was the father she revered far different from her memory of him, but that the man with whom she is in love is willing to go to any lengths to hide an explosive fact that could destroy him.