Hidden Jewel

Hidden Jewel is a novel by the American writer V. C. Andrews, published in 1995 and one of the books about the Landry family.

Pearl is the character the reader follows, and her situation is a familiar one in these novels: a young woman who has been given a comfortable life on condition that she does not ask about the past, in a house where the adults' arrangements are treated as final. Her mother Ruby's history, the bayou and the Cajun family she came from, and the accident that befalls one of Pearl's twin brothers all reach her from outside the mansion, and each of them makes the version of her life she has been given harder to hold on to. Andrews writes the Louisiana setting as a place where money and respectability are recent and reversible, and the domestic horror of the series comes from how quickly the people closest to a young woman can become the danger. Andrews died in 1986 and the later novels in her series were written under her name by a ghostwriter, which is a fact about the publishing history rather than the book.