Di has just seen her extravagant employer off on a second, sensational marriage and been left without a penny or a reference, when a man called Peter arrives to fetch her: her Aunt Emma, a small, plain woman of remarkable will, wants her as secretary for some scientific work. In the house she finds Peter, his son Miles, a forbidden room and an instruction not to leave, and a family that has decided what she is for before she arrived. Holding wrote domestic suspense before the term existed; Raymond Chandler called her the top suspense writer of them all.
