Game of Secrets: A Novel

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.

Caroline Leavitt">

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.