The Society

In Winn’s sumptuous and twisty second novel (after Our Little World), two women are drawn into a mysterious secret society in contemporary Boston. When antiques dealer Vivian Lawrence, heir to old Boston money, discovers she’s in financial trouble, she begins investigating her family’s connection to the Knox, an exclusive social club enriched by the 19th-century opium trade. Vivian comes to believe that one of her ancestors was the illegitimate daughter of the Knox’s founder and that she’s entitled to a cut of the organization’s fortune. After entering the society’s Beacon Hill headquarters, she winds up at the bottom of a flight of stairs with a traumatic brain injury and doesn’t remember how she fell. In the hospital’s ICU, she’s treated by young emergency room nurse Taylor Adams, a recent transplant from North Carolina with aspirations to join the upper crust of Boston society. When Vivian mysteriously disappears from the ICU, Taylor decides to track her down, and her search leads her to the Knox, where she takes a job in the club’s restaurant, hoping to find clues to Vivian’s whereabouts. Both Taylor and Vivian have enough flaws to credibly land themselves in peril and some dubious romantic entanglements, and the Knox is fascinatingly baroque, soaked in history and possibly deadly mysticism. For suspense fans, this is a delight. Agent: Stacy Testa, Writers House. (Jan.)