When the marchioness is found murdered at Polbrook mansion, the Dowager Lady Polbrook's new companion, Ottilia Draycott, finds herself in a house of strangers and every one of them a suspect. Only she can unmask and outwit a desperate killer and keep a Polbrook family secret buried.

Never underestimate the resolve of a lady’s companion. She’s a woman of incomparable cunning, insatiable curiosity, and as unfailingly attentive to her duties, as she is to the intricacies of murder in… The Gilded Shroud

Pity the chambermaid who found the body—sprawled across a disheveled four-poster bed with a bruised neck revealing a grim truth: poor Emily, wife of the Marquis of Polbrook, had been strangled in the night. The last thing Emily’s brother-in-law, Lord Francis Fanshawe, expects to find so soon after the crime is an adept investigator already settled comfortably in the Polbrook mansion.

She is Ottilia Draycott, the Dowager Lady Polbrook’s new young companion, intelligent, resourceful, observant, and the family’s hope in establishing the innocence of the Marquis, despite a motive: he wished Emily gone. But as Ottilia pieces together a picture of Emily’s death, complications arise: the Marquis has gone missing, along with the theft of a priceless heirloom.

Now Ottilia has found herself in a house of strangers and every one of them a suspect. And only she can unmask and outwit a killer too desperate not to replay the murderous events of that fateful night to keep a family secret buried.