WINDOW ON THE SQUARE
By
New York in the backwash of the Tweed Ring extravagances provides the setting for a story with a strong suspense element, which is still secondary to a strangely contorted (and not always convincing) love story. Here is a sort of Jane Eyre tale, of a governess-dressmaker, brought into a household to help rescue a nine-year-old boy from the dread aura of his near conviction for the murder of the father he had deeply loved. She finds a shadowed household, the boy's mother, presumably still submerged in grief over the violent death of her husband, but already married to his brother; the step-father and uncle, living under the shadow of suspicion on several grounds- as a philanderer, as marrying his brother's widow to protect himself; the two children, the girl, spoiled and sometimes waspish, the boy, closed in with his own grief and self-doubt, accused of everything that goes awry. And then the staff, mixed in their loyalties, and quickly aware that the newcomer was falling under the master's spell, watch from various angles, to see the developments march to the tragic and unexpected conclusion. Good summer entertainment, bracketing both the mystery and the woman's love story fields.