The Last Daughter
Young and vivacious Caitlin went missing in mysterious circumstances over a decade ago. Since then her twin sister, Serena, has struggled to put the trauma behind her. The trauma is made worse because she has suffered from dissociative amnesia. When Caitlin’s body is discovered near their grandparents’ former home set within the ruins of Minster Lovell Hall, Oxfordshire, Serena has no choice but to return to the village to identify the body. She is also determined to find out the truth at last. The mystery deepens when she learns Caitlin’s body was discovered totally sealed inside a medieval tomb. Only her body shows that it was a recent burial. What on earth?
In this gripping novel, the modern world, history, the supernatural, myth and legend collide. At the heart of the mystery is the Lovell Lodestar, a small piece of rock with astounding powers which ties Serena’s family to the centuries-old royal mystery which still intrigues today. Whatever happened to the 15th-century Princes in the Tower?
This is the very first of Nicola Cornick’s historical mysteries I have read and will not be the last. I was soon engrossed in what begins as a modern “missing person” thriller but is soon intertwined with one family’s struggles during the Wars of the Roses. The Lost Daughter is a spine-chilling, page-turning time-slip novel that kept me reading too late into the night. I enjoyed it hugely. However, I was shocked to find an author who has clearly put in hours of research confusing the two totally separate actions of spinning and weaving.
