From the late 1930s to the 1950s, an adoption organisation in Memphis, Tennessee, coerced parents into giving up their children. If that strategy failed, they kidnapped and sold poor children to wealthy families all over the country, often to order. This crime was ignored and even supported by the local authorities, all in the interests of providing these children with a better future.

Fast forward to the current time, and Avery Stafford is born into a life of wealth and privilege as the daughter of a US senator. She has a successful law career, a society wedding to plan, and is being groomed to take her father’s place at some point in the future. But a chance meeting with an eccentric elderly woman in a nursing home she visits piques her curiosity and encourages her to explore the woman’s previously unknown connection to her grandmother, who is also in care elsewhere with advancing Alzheimer’s disease.

This novel is unfortunately not sure what it is. Is it a social commentary on the evils of past adoption practices? Or is it a mystery in which Avery unravels family secrets long held and long suppressed? The plot device of telling the story through Rill, a gypsy child, is not really successful; we have only a child’s fragmented observations, and doubts about the reliability of the narrative are sown in the mind of the reader. Avery’s investigation of her family secrets is more effective, but there is no real mystery as it is obvious from the beginning what she will discover and how her own life will be affected by the discovery.

This could have been a remarkable novel but it was, unfortunately, superficial and predictable.

Reviewed by Lesley West