Seven for a Secret shares with Holt's earlier novels a background in the gothic and romance fiction of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The contemporary appeal of her stories is enhanced with the introduction of modern concerns, such as child abuse and the proper role of women, and a reduced reliance on the possibility of the supernatural for the chill of fear.

The title of the novel is taken from a children's rhyme in which Holt was quick to note the dark implications, which she draws out in the story. Frederica, as she herself notes, has the character of a "romancer." When she first sees the picture of the magpies that illustrates the rhyme, she is struck by the tinge of evil given to the message by the birds. Frederica is attuned to these feelings of uncanniness as others are not. As Tamarisk St. Aubyn writes...