The Cartographer's Secret

A gripping historical mystery for fans of Kate Morton and Natasha Lester’s The Paris Seamstress, The Cartographer’s Secret follows a young woman’s quest to heal a family rift as she becomes entangled in one of Australia’s greatest historical puzzles.

The Hunter Valley, 1880

Evie Ludgrove loves to map the landscape around her home—hardly surprising since she grew up in the shadow of her father’s obsession with the great Australian explorer Dr. Ludwig Leichhardt. So when an advertisement appears in The Bulletin magazine offering a thousand-pound reward for proof of where Leichhardt met his fate, Evie is determined to figure it out—after all, there are clues in her father’s papers and in the archives of The Royal Geographical Society. But when Evie sets out to prove her theory, she vanishes without a trace, leaving behind a mystery that haunts everyone’s lives for 30 years.

1911

When Letitia Rawlings arrives at the family estate in her Model T Ford, her purpose is to inform her great aunt Olivia of another loss in their family. But Letitia is also escaping her own problems—her brother’s sudden death, her mother’s scheming, and her own dissatisfaction with the life planned out for her. So when Letitia discovers a beautifully illustrated map that might hold a clue to the fate of her missing aunt, Evie Ludgrove, her curiosity is piqued and she sets out to discover the truth of Evie’s disappearance. But all is not as it seems at Yellow Rock estate, and as events unfold, Letitia begins to realize that solving the mystery of her family’s past could offer as much peril as redemption.