Secrecy » (Reprint)

Known for her dramatic love epics with vivid characterizations Belva Plain first entranced readers back in 1979 with the made-for-miniseries romance, Evergreen.

Something terrible happened to Charlotte Dawes when she was 14, something that's become the center of a tangled mass of family secrets that threatens to destroy every member of the Dawes family. No one -- not her father, the well-respected Bill Dawes, or her absent mother Elena, or her uncle Cliff -- knows how to help Charlotte face what her new cousin Ted did to her. Only Claudia, Ted's mother, who must face her own agony at having raised this monster, can reach Charlotte, befriending her, serving as a sort of surrogate mother.

For the Dawes family, what happened to Charlotte was the beginning of the end. Once factory owners and major employers in this New England mill town, the family has been plunged into debt and disgrace. The mill site has been leased to unscrupulous businessmen who are carelessly destroying the environment. And worse: Ted, accused of attacking two other girls, jumped bail and vanished. Charlotte is now in her mid-20s, an architect with a promising future. She's bright, beautiful -- and endlessly alone.

A brief trip to her hometown provides her with a flash of inspiration, an urban renewal project designed to restore the mill site and return her family's respect within the town. She and Roger, the young construction executive whom she befriends in Boston, who takes an enormous interest in the project, begin to make it reality. But after months of preparation, the plans suddenly grind to a halt -- and when Charlotte finally discovers who is at the center of the problem, old secrets rise to the surface again, demanding to be untangled. It's a terrifying process, but one that might open the way for Charlotte to truly let someone into her life.

Combining Belva Plain's signature storytelling with an electrifying narrative that sweeps the reader along to its startling conclusion, Secrecy tells a tale of injustice, of wild hearts and stubborn minds and of a young woman's struggle to make sense of her family.

Publishers Weekly

The characters in this labyrinthine 14th novel from perennial bestseller Plain (Promises) live undercover lives, each hiding a secret from the others. At the center of this web of reticence, which stretches from the mid-1980s to the present, stands Charlotte Dawes. The product of a doomed marriage between flighty Italian-born Elena and decent New England textile heir Bill, teenaged Charlotte endures first her parents' separation, then rape at the hands of a stepcousin, Ted. The evil act is even more destructive because Ted, the one villain in a noble cast, is the son of Charlotte's Aunt Claudia, a widow newly married to her father's brother, and a surrogate mother to Charlotte. Claudia has her own secret, linking the death of her first husband in Chicago and the troubles besetting the Dawes brothers at their failing mill. Although Charlotte becomes a promising architect, she remains traumatized, and it's only when she meets Roger Heywood, a builder, that she can accept physical love. The couple must survive the revelation of another shocking secret, and even a threat from Mother Nature, before their rosy future looms. Plain handles her characters' complex troubles (emotional and financial) with sympathy -- though sometimes with awkward shifts in point of view. She offers us one epiphany after another as the veil of secrecy is gradually lifted, and she allows Charlotte's story an affectingly muted denouement. Literary Guild main selection. (July)