The Hidden Girl

Lucinda Riley and Harry Whittaker

FAMILY secrets from the past explode into a nightmare of forbidden love, thwarted desire, revenge and murder in a sweeping and deliciously dark saga from superstar storyteller Lucinda Riley whose untimely death in 2021 has – thankfully for her many global fans – not ended the joy of discovering her dazzling array of novels.

Long before the Me Too movement sparked the conviction and jailing of high-profile sex offenders like American film producer Harvey Weinstein in 2022, Riley (pictured below) was hatching a story about the menacing side of fame, toxic masculinity, and the ability of ruthless, powerful men to destroy the lives of vulnerable women.

The Hidden Girl – originally published as Hidden Beauty in 1993 under the name Lucinda Edmonds – was Riley’s second novel and written at the age of twenty-six, many years before she became the acclaimed author of her groundbreaking eight-book Seven Sisters series which gripped readers across the world.

It had always been her intention to reintroduce Hidden Beauty to the world but she never had the opportunity so her (heroic!) son Harry Whittaker (pictured below) – co-author of the last Seven Sisters book, Atlas: The Story of Pa Salt – has once more stepped into the breach and reworked this heartbreaking and hard-hitting lost treasure which transports us from the wilds of Yorkshire’s Bronte country in the 1970s and the glamorous catwalks of Milan to the horrors of the Treblinka extermination camp in wartime Poland.

And what a fine job he has made of it, ensuring that readers can enjoy and admire his mother’s story of stunning prescience and disturbing truths... a breathtaking, time-weaving standalone tale which is based on Riley’s own early life experiences as an actress and model, and shines a light on the dangerously controlling and sexually abusive behaviour of men in positions of immense power or wealth.

Born and raised in a small village on the Yorkshire moors, Leah Thompson looks more beautiful with each passing day. Her mother Doreen is housekeeper to 46-year-old Rose Delancey, a famous artist from a troubled family, now living far from the spotlight and keeping her past securely locked away. Leah has grown up alongside Rose’s darkly mysterious and unsettling older son Miles, and her prematurely worldly and wayward adopted daughter Miranda, and by the time she is sixteen, Leah’s ethereal beauty has caught the attention of Rose’s long-lost nephew Brett Cooper, and friends from London’s high-profile modelling agencies.

Whisked off to the big city, where she finds comfort in new-found friendships and being able to send money home to her parents , Leah is soon taking the 1980s modelling world by storm, travelling from Milan to London and New York, and living life in the lap of luxury.

But Leah can’t escape the past which follows her like a dark shadow, a past that is mysteriously intertwined with the tragic tale of two young siblings in Poland caught up in the Holocaust during the Second World War.

As two generations of secrets threaten to erupt, Leah is also haunted by a fatal, forgotten prophecy... one that she had hoped would die away but which she must now fight if she is to challenge the destiny that was mapped out for her in the stars.

The Hidden Girl is an exciting posthumous gift from a writer who never ceases to amaze her readers as she once more transports us from the pedestrian realities of everyday life into a two-generational epic where good battles evil, friendships are formed, love awakens, and festering secrets have deadly consequences.

At its heart is Yorkshire lass Leah Thompson, an ordinary girl with an extraordinary beauty who discovers that her fateful association with the Delancey family might be the catalyst for her fame and fortune, but that it comes with a heavy personal price. Leah’s rise from humble beginnings in rural Yorkshire to modelling super stardom and life in New York’s Fifth Avenue and other exclusive foreign enclaves is overshadowed by tragedy, thwarted love affairs, the deadly fall-out from vaulting ambition, and a fatal, forgotten prophecy that refuses to be banished.

Juxtaposed with Leah’s trials and tribulations in the vibrant post-war age are the privations and perils of staying alive in the ghettoes of wartime Warsaw and surviving the daily terrors of the notorious Treblinka camp where death was only ever a heartbeat away. Brimming from start to finish with emotional intensity, and fizzing with menace and intrigue, The Hidden Girl explores the eternal themes of love, loss and redemption in a journey that is littered with twists and turns and revelations, and springs a wickedly unexpected sting in its tail.

And in her trademark style, Riley seamlessly weaves together the two timelines, investing readers’ interest in both past and present, delivering a plot of incredible intricacy and imagination, and thrilling us with a cast of unforgettable characters on a spectrum from the terrifyingly evil to the exquisitely vulnerable. A treat for Lucinda’s army of fans... and a reminder of her exceptional talent.
(Macmillan, hardback, £22)