Dream of Orchids

Dream of Orchids is a romantic suspense novel by the American writer Phyllis A. Whitney, published in 1985.

Laurel runs a bookshop on Long Island and has spent her life in a state of managed anger about her father, Clifton York, a novelist who left her mother when Laurel was small and never came back. The visitor who walks into the shop and picks up her father's latest book is Marcus O'Neill, and what he tells her about the family she has never met takes her away from the life she has built and into a household that turns out to be full of the kind of secrets her father wrote about. What she finds there is her father's second family and the questions she has been carrying since childhood, which is a great deal to bring into a house that has its own reasons for keeping quiet. Whitney wrote more than seventy novels in this vein, and the pattern she used is a woman arriving in an unfamiliar place and working out which of the people around her can be trusted, with a romance running alongside the mystery.