Under the Stars

Audrey Fisher has struggled all her life to emerge from the shadow of her famous mother by forging a career as a world-class chef. Meredith Fisher’s glamorous screen persona disguises the trauma of the tragic accident that haunts her dreams. Neither woman wants to return to the New England island they left behind and its complicated emotional ties, but Meredith has one last chance to sober up and salvage her big comeback. Where else but discreet, moneyed Winthrop Island can a famous actress spend the summer without the intrusion of other people?

Then Audrey discovers an old wooden chest among the belongings of her estranged bartender father. The astonishing contents draw the women deep into Winthrop’s past and its many secrets—attracting the interest of their handsome neighbor. How did a trove of paintings from one of America’s greatest artists wind up in the cellar of the Mohegan Inn? And who is the mysterious woman portrayed on every canvas?

On a stormy November night in 1846, Providence Dare flees Boston and boards the luxury steamship Atlantic one step ahead of the law—or so she believes. But when a catastrophic accident leaves the ship at the mercy of a mighty gale, Providence finds herself trapped in a deadly game of cat and mouse with the one man who knows her real identity—the detective investigating the suspicious death of her employer, the painter Henry Irving.

As the Atlantic fights for her life and the rocky shore of Winthrop Island edges closer, a desperate Providence searches for her chance to escape before the sea swallows her without a trace.

In Under the Stars, the destinies of three women converge across centuries as a harrowing true disaster at the dawn of the steamship era evokes a complex legacy of family secrets in modern-day New England.