Compellingly readable and riddled with twists and turns worthy of Daphne du Maurier, Chase’s tale will delight fans of...
Thirty years apart, two women’s secrets unfold within Black Rabbit Hall, a ramshackle ancestral home set in windswept Cornwall.
In the late 1960s, Hugo Alton doted on Nancy, his gorgeous and gregarious wife. Indeed, Amber and her twin brother, Toby, often felt a bit like intruders when their parents kissed. Vacations spent at Black Rabbit Hall—a magical place where slates flying off the roof don’t matter because the stars shine more brightly near the stormy sea—were the highlight of the children’s lives. That is, until Nancy’s unexpected death. Yet at Nancy’s funeral, a mysterious woman enters the church, a woman Hugo seems to know well. Much too soon for Amber's taste, this icy woman, Caroline Shawcross, and her dark son, Lucian, have ensconced themselves into their lives, with devastating effects. Three decades later, the Hall is in a pitiable state, and its remaining guardian, Mrs. Caroline Alton, is eager to hire it out as a venue for weddings. Enter Lorna Dunaway and her fiance, Jon. Jon questions whether the wilds of Cornwall might be a little far for their London family to travel; he’s even more alarmed at the leaky roof, warped woodwork, and layers of dust. Is it even safe? Lorna, however, is absolutely smitten with Black Rabbit Hall, and she seizes eagerly upon Mrs. Alton’s invitation to stay for a few nights, much to Jon’s dismay. Soon enough, the house begins to weave a spell over Lorna, nudging her to notice relics that seem to point to her own past. Debut novelist Chase weaves together Lorna’s investigations with Amber’s tribulations, a tapestry embroidered with madness, a horrifying accident, and malicious lies.
Compellingly readable and riddled with twists and turns worthy of Daphne du Maurier, Chase’s tale will delight fans of romantic mysteries.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-399-17412-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A compulsively readable melodrama.
After her father’s sudden death, a daughter discovers disturbing facts about a sister presumed dead more than two decades earlier.
One way or another, Lisa MacPherson, a musical prodigy, has always dominated the lives of her family. By the age of 17, she's a violin virtuoso with a bright future. Unaccountably, on a winter morning, Lisa’s kayak (though not her body) is discovered in the ice-bound Potomac near the family’s Alexandria, Virginia, home. Shortly after the tragedy, the family moves to North Carolina. Lisa’s younger siblings, Danny, 7, and Riley, 2, will be told only that Lisa suffered from depression and committed suicide. Twenty-three years later, Riley, who has become a high school guidance counselor to help depressed teens like Lisa, is settling her father Frank’s affairs after his death from a heart attack. (Her mother had succumbed to cancer years before.) While getting ready to sell his North Carolina real estate—her childhood home and a trailer park—Riley runs across several people who harbor secrets about her family’s past: Danny, a mentally troubled Iraq War vet, nurses grudges against his parents while living as a virtual hermit on the outskirts of the trailer park. Her father’s friend Tom exhibits a threatening mien. Jeannie, another family friend, appears helpful, but what is she hiding? Riley discovers that her father was paying Tom off, but why? Early on, Lisa’s voice, and her version of events, emerges. We learn that she was accused of murdering her violin teacher and was about to stand trial. Her suicide was faked by her father and Tom, both ex-U.S. Marshals skilled at making people disappear. Her father relocated her to San Diego, where, ignoring Frank’s warnings to avoid music, she found new outlets for her extraordinary talent. Although the plot is not exactly watertight, the revelations are parceled out so skillfully that disbelief remains suspended until the satisfying if not entirely plausible close.
A compulsively readable melodrama.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-250-01071-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An improvement over The Dead Zone, with King returning to his most tried-and-true blueprint. As in The Shining, the psi-carrier is a child, an eight-year-old girl named Charlie; but instead of foresight or hindsight, Charlie has firestarting powers. She looks and a thing pops into flame—a teddy bear, a nasty man's shoes, or (by novel's end) steel walls, whole houses, and stables and crowds of government villains. Charlie's parents Vicky and Andy were once college guinea pigs for drug experiments by The Shop, a part of the supersecret Department of Scientific Intelligence, and were given a hyperpowerful hallucinogen which affected their chromosomes and left each with strange powers of mental transference and telekinesis. When Vicky and Andy married, their genes produced Charlie and her wild talent for pyrokinesis: even as a baby in her crib, Charlie would start fires when upset and, later on, once set her mother's hands on fire. So Andy is trying to teach Charlie how to keep her volatile emotions in check. But when one day he comes home to find Vicky gruesomely dead in the ironing-board-closet, murdered by The Shop (all the experimental guinea pigs are being eliminated), Andy goes into hiding with Charlie in Manhattan and the Vermont backwoods—and Charlie uses her powers to set the bad men on fire and blow up their cars. They're soon captured, however, by Rainbird, a one-eyed giant Indian with a melted face—and father and daughter, separated, spend months being tested in The Shop. Then Andy engineers their escape, but when Andy is shot by Rainbird, Charlie turns loose her atomic eyes on the big compound. . . . Dumb, very, and still a far cry from the excitement of The Shining or Salem's Lot—but King keeps the story moving with his lively fire-gimmick and fewer pages of cotton padding than in his recent, sluggish efforts. The built-in readership will not be disappointed.
Pub Date: Sept. 29, 1980
ISBN: 0451167805
Page Count: 398
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1980
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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