Massachusetts, 1897: Bertha Mellish, âthe most peculiar, quiet, reserved girlâ at Mount Holyoke College, is missing.
As a search team dredges the pond where Bertha might have drowned, her panicked father and sister arrive desperate to find some clue to her fate or state of mind. Berthaâs best friend, Agnes, a scholarly loner studying medicine, might know the truth, but she is being unhelpfully
tightlipped, inciting the suspicions of Berthaâs family, her classmates, and the private investigator hired by the Mellish family doctor. As secrets from Agnesâs and Berthaâs lives come to light, so do the competing agendas driving each person who is searching for Bertha.
Where did Bertha go? Who would want to hurt her? And could she still be alive?
Edmund White Awardâwinning author Katharine Beutner takes a real-life unsolved mystery and crafts it into an unforgettable historical portrait of academia, family trauma, and the risks faced by women who dared to pursue unconventional paths at the end of the 19th century.