Jane Weld was eleven years old when her father, Luce, disappeared in 1957. 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.
 
A Boston Globe bestseller
 
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“A combination of thriller, mystery, and literary fiction . . . an intelligent beach-read.”—The Boston Phoenix
 
“Drop-dead Yankee storytelling . . . Elizabeth Strout fans will find a lot to admire about [Game of Secrets], cleverly framed around the idea of revealing old family mysteries through a continuing series of Scrabble games.”—Minneapolis Star Tribune
 
“Like a Faulkner novel, Game of Secrets weaves in and out of time. . . . The varied points of view and fragments are rendered with such poetry, each sentence is a pleasure.”—The Providence Journal
 
“A gracefully told character study of three intelligent, forbidding women and the men who love them, wrapped up in a taut, suspenseful mystery.”—Booklist
 
“Irresistible . . . 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.”—Caroline Leavitt, author of Pictures of You

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Dawn Tripp graduated from Harvard and lives in Massachusetts with her husband and two sons. She is the author of the novels Moon Tide and The Season of Open Water, which won the Massachusetts Book Award for Fiction.


From the Hardcover edition.

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