Game of Secrets: A Novel (Random House Reader's Circle)

In 1957, Jane Weld was eleven years old when her father, Luce, disappeared. His skiff was found drifting near a marsh, empty except for his hunting coat and a box of shotgun shells. No one in their small New England town knew for sure what happened until, three years later, Luce s skull rolled out of a gravel pit, a bullet hole in the temple. Rumors sprang up that he had been murdered by the jealous husband of his mistress, Ada Varick.

Now, half a century later, Jane is still searching for the truth of her father s death, a mystery made more urgent by the unexpected romance that her willful daughter, Marne, has struck up with one of Ada s sons. As the love affair intensifies, Jane and Ada meet for their weekly Friday game of Scrabble, a pastime that soon transforms into a cat-and-mouse game of words long left unspoken, and dark secrets best left untold.


Guest Reviewer: Caroline Leavitt
Caroline Leavitt is the New York Times bestselling author of Pictures of You, a San Francisco Chronicle Editor s Choice and one of Bookpage Magazine s 20 best novels of 2011 so far. The author of eight previous novels, Caroline is also a book critic for The Boston Globe and People, and a senior writing instructor at the UCLA Writers Program online.

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Picture this: A few months ago, I m riding a New York City subway reading Dawn Tripp s extraordinary Game of Secrets. I m so enthralled that I actually miss my stop. I get off the subway, tucking the book in my bag, but in the middle of teeming Times Square, I can t help it--I pull out the book, just to read another passage.

Not many books can do this to me.

Game of Secrets is a stunner. The story of a missing father, a murder, and two feuding families tied together in scandal, it s also about the heady rush of desire and the knot of family. Just reading the storyline is thrilling: Young Jane Weld s father vanishes, his skull later found pierced with a bullet hole. Some people whisper that the husband of his mistress, Ada Varick, shot him, but there s no proof. Fast forward fifty years, and Jane and Ada are now locked into a casual game of Scrabble every Friday, slowly playing their hands and releasing their darkest secrets to each other. But as Jane s daughter Marne begins to fall in love with Ada s son, Jane s desperation to know the truth becomes even more crucial.

Irresistible, right?

An unusual love story melded to a literary thriller, and filled with exquisite language and dazzlingly alive characters, Game of Secrets is unlike anything you ve ever read before.