This novel captured me from the very first page, from the very first paragraph even. I can state it no more plainly than by writing that this first novel by Kate Morton is one of the finest novels that I have read in a long time. It is a stunning and auspicious inaugural effort by an Australian author who has crafted a near perfect piece of literature. All the more credit is due to her for the way she has knitted together a complex web of plots, mysteries, secrets, lifestyles, and characters into a larger than life literary bouillabaisse which seamlessly moves back and forth in time from the late 1990's to the years right before and for some time after World War One.

Ninety-eight year old Grace Bradley is approaching the end of her days at an English nursing home, and during her quiet times she has occasion to reflect back on the signature events in her life. This highly educated former archeologist and widow with two middle-aged children finds that the events which most capture her reflections are neither her career nor her children, but rather a much earlier time in her life back during the Teens and Twenties of post-Edwardian England when her first job was as a lowly housemaid in service to the Hartford family at Riverton House. 

Those events took place so long ago that she thought that they would have stayed buried forever, but obviously not just yet. This story starts eloquently with, "Last November I had a nightmare. It was 1924 and I was at Riverton again. All the doors hung wide open, silk billowing in the summer breeze."

Yes, a nightmare, for the foundation of this elegant story is the shocking death of a rising young poet at a party which took place on a warm summer evening in 1924. At the time he was a close friend of the two Hartford daughters, but on that evening he reportedly pulled out a gun and committed suicide in the family pavilion on the lake. Another tragedy followed shortly thereafter as the younger daughter, Emmeline Hartford, a movie star and frequent fodder for the society columns, died in a car crash. Hannah Hartford, the older daughter, also passed away a few years later well before her time.  

The mystery surrounding the poet's death was never adequately explained, and now Ursula Ryan, a film producer and coincidentally a great granddaughter of another guest at that party, wants to make a movie about that night. She needs Grace's help to verify the authenticity of the furnishings in a set replicating the family drawing room at Riverton House. Needless to say, it is of great interest to her that Grace is the only person left who was at the scene of the tragedy.

Born in the first year of the New Century, Grace recalls her first day on the job as a housemaid right after her fourteenth birthday in 1914. Her mother had also worked for the Hartfords, but had been let go from service for reasons which she never discusses. Grace has to prove herself, and she does so with her hard work, her discretion, her native intelligence, and her attention to detail. 

It is not long before she is promoted to the plum position of being the personal maid to Hannah Hartford. While young, the three girls play together more like sisters, and by the time the Hartford daughters come of age, Grace has been with them for so long that there is little that she does not know about them. In addition, she has become the confidante of Hannah, who has no one else her age to confide in.

While the collapse of the age of the landed gentry is covered here, it only forms a minor backdrop to the beautifully depicted personalities and relationships of the Hartford family, most particularly Grace's relationship with Hannah and a witness to the decline of a once great family. 2006, Atria Books, a division of Simon & Schuster. Originally published in Australia and titled, "The Shifting Fog."