Effective author Molly Hunt, the used daughter of Long Island parents, is stunned whenever a good-looking man she meets in her publisher’s office makes a startling declaration: that he’s going to marry her twin sister. Molly soon discovers that she is in fact the long-lost kid of the rich Mountfort family of Charleston, SC. Eager to solve the puzzle of her delivery, Molly begins a fateful journey south.

In the historic family plantation, she fits her beautiful twin Amelia, their reclusive mother, and a cast of intriguing yet disturbing characters who both question her identity and, within their way, confirm it. Even so, her arrival has set in motion some strange and frightening occasions, and in the intoxicating, magnolia-scented globe of Molly’s primary family, haunting remembrances of an unsolved murder threaten the family’s very existence-as well as her own.