Amelia grew up in a glamorous part of London. Her mother is a playwright and her father was an adventurer and entrepreneur before entrepreneurs were really even a thing.
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In 1971, when she was seven years old she met a handsome young boy of nine, Leopold Alcott. Amelia immediately began to incorporate Leo into her dreams. Little did she know that Leo began building his dreams around her too.
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When Amelia was eight her father Maynard and Leo's father Bennet, disappeared, never to be seen again...at least they haven't up until now. When Maynard vanished, Amelia's mother Maud fell into a vat of scotch to drown her sorrows, she had not yet managed the steep climb back out.
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When Amelia was fifteen, her best friend, Daisy Forrester, was kidnapped, and although she was recovered, Daisy had disappeared from Amelia's life, just as her father had almost eight years earlier.
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When she was eighteen, while working behind the scenes on one of Maud's plays, Amelia had investigated and solved the murder of a stagehand, Jim. That case (covered in A Killer Observation) had Amelia swearing off sleuthing forever!
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At twenty-three, Amelia went to Hyde Park to meet Leo for a date - a date on which she expected him to propose marriage - but he had never arrived. Four days later, she receive a letter from him telling her he had gone in search of Maynard and Bennet and wouldn't be returning until he found them.
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That's how Amelia, who had so much, came to lose everything but her rock, the one person that connected her to her father...Sebastian Ferver.
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Sebastian and his island El Pedrusco had been the last thing Amelia had left in the world that was solid and good...Until now. Now, she is sitting in a solicitor's office in Grosvenor Square, as he reads the Last Will and Testament of Sebastian Ferdinand Dunnicliffe Ferver.