What Happened to Adelaide

In 1867, fourteen-year-old Adelaide accuses her violent father of murdering her mother. Before her school friends Elizabeth and Cybil can protect her, he drags Adelaide into a carriage and disappears with her. The police dismiss the girls' desperate warnings as childish imagination. Adelaide is never seen again-and Elizabeth and Cybil are left haunted by the belief that they failed their friend when she needed them most.

Fifty-nine years later, newly married adventurer Cora Thorogood discovers a mysterious turquoise stone hidden inside an old museum crate. The moment she touches it, she is pulled into terrifying visions of a frightened girl fleeing through the darkness from a man determined to kill her. When Cora realizes she may be witnessing Adelaide's final hours, she joins Elizabeth, Cybil, and the loyal Molly on a journey to Chelmsford, England, to uncover the truth.

Their search leads them through forgotten police records, abandoned cemeteries, a secretive apothecary, and the shadowed corridors of Adelaide's former school. But the quiet English town has guarded its secrets for generations. Old witnesses refuse to speak, respectable citizens conceal dangerous loyalties, and a criminal organization once thought destroyed may still be operating behind closed doors.

Then the life of an elderly investigator connected to Adelaide's disappearance may be in jeopardy. Cora must determine whether the new crimes are meant to hide the truth about Adelaide-or whether the same darkness that claimed her family has returned. With the help of her spirited companions and a secret community of living wooden Villagers, Cora follows the clues while an unseen enemy watches every move.

Blending historical mystery, supernatural intrigue, humor, danger, and an enduring story of friendship, What Happened to Adelaide? follows four determined women as they confront a crime buried for nearly six decades. To find justice, they must expose the lies of the past before another innocent life is lost-and before the truth reaches out from the shadows to claim them all.