THE HOUSE OF WHISPERS

In Purcell’s third creepily atmospheric historical novel, a young woman flees London under a dark cloud only to discover new threats in superstition-haunted early Victorian Cornwall.

After serving as Lady Rose Windrop’s maid in elegant Hanover Square, Esther Stevens, having assumed the name of Hester Why, is unprepared for the stark contrast of her new position as a nurse and personal maid to the silent and partially paralyzed Louise Pinecroft, mistress of the cliffside Morvoren House. In the remote, eerie mansion she finds a strange household enacting bizarre local customs. Salt lines the doorway of Rosewyn Pinecroft’s bedroom. Wearing her dress inside out, Rosewyn, Louise’s childlike adult ward, gives the startled Hester a ball of bible pages “for protection.”Creeda, Rosewyn's caretaker and the longest serving member of the staff, warns Hester against being “pixy-led.” Alternating with Hester’s increasingly unreliable first-person narrative (aided by gin and stolen laudanum) are two other storylines. One reveals Hester’s hidden guilt at the events that drove her from London. The other goes back 40 years to when a young Louise assists her grief-stricken physician father as he embarks on a radical experiment using prisoners to find a cure for the tuberculosis that killed the rest of their family. Purcell excels at creating a spooky Gothic ambience, and the wild Cornish coast with its ancient folklore makes a wonderfully evocative backdrop. She also does a good job at establishing psychological ambiguity in her characters so they (and readers) aren’t sure if what they see is real or if they are going mad.

A dark and unsettling novel for lovers of Rebecca and Jane Eyre.