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Home / Series / Doors to the Past

Series

Doors to the Past

Doors to the Past is a multi-author dual-timeline series in which present-day characters investigate mysteries attached to historic American buildings, objects and landmarks. Letters, journals, hidden rooms, human remains, artworks and family stories connect modern romances with unresolved events from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The books move from San Antonio hotels and the Golden Gate Bridge to steamboats, theatres, forts and private homes. Although each novel stands alone, the series consistently uses material traces of the past to explore memory, inheritance, injustice and the way an incomplete historical record can continue to shape later generations.

Reading order

Books in this series (12 books)

Hope Between the Pages cover

#2 – Hope Between the Pages

Kimberley Woodhouse

Clara Blackwell helps run her family’s century-old Asheville bookshop, but declining business threatens to end the inheritance passed down through generations. A forgotten letter written by her great-great-grandmother suggests that an unresolved romance and an undiscovered legacy may offer the shop a future. With only the…

Bridge of Gold cover

#3 – Bridge of Gold

Kimberley Woodhouse

Underwater archaeologist Kayla Richardson is called to the Golden Gate Bridge after restoration work reveals two sets of human remains associated with different stages of San Francisco’s past. Diving with project leader Steven Michaels, she finds evidence that connects a nineteenth-century Gold Rush mystery with the…

High-Wire Heartbreak cover

#6 – High-Wire Heartbreak

Kimberley Woodhouse

Historical novelist Chloe Whitfield visits Ca’ d’Zan in Sarasota to investigate stories about her great-grandmother Lucinda Conroy, reputedly a noted trapeze performer. A surviving poster places Lucinda at John Ringling’s seventieth-birthday gala in 1936, when a robbery and possible death disturbed the celebration. Lucinda’s child was…

Laura’s Shadow cover

#9 – Laura’s Shadow

Kimberley Woodhouse

De Smet, South Dakota, 1890. Mariah Patterson loves Cap Garland despite his continuing attachment to Laura Ingalls. Convinced that devotion can overcome both family expectations and Cap’s idealised memory of Laura, she risks reputation and security by declaring what she wants. In 1974, Mariah’s great-granddaughter Trixie…

Passages of Hope cover

#10 – Passages of Hope

Kimberley Woodhouse

During renovations to her grandmother’s Philadelphia house, Gracie Kingston discovers a concealed room connected by a passage to the nearby home of abolitionist William Still. Questions about the property’s ownership suggest that the building was part of a larger network whose history was deliberately obscured. In…