Who walks in the shadows?

Book review: The Walker in the Shadows by Barbara Michaels

It's no secret that I like books written in the good old 60's and 70's, when the plots were simple and yet engaging, relationships were less turbulent and morals were not as lax as they are now. In fact, the quaint manners and social mores of those times are what attract me most to these mysteries and romances. Give me a novel by Victoria Holt, Mary Stewart, Barbara Cartland or Elizabeth Peters and I would any day be more excited to read it that the breakneck-paced thrillers by modern novelists! I am currently going through a gothic revival phase and one of my favourite gothic comfort reads are the mildly scary novels by Barbara Michaels (the pen name of Barbara Mertz who also wrote as Elizabeth Peters). Having read most of her novels in the past, I was pleasantly surprised to find that I had missed out on a few promising ones. So I started off with Ammie, Come Home which I liked and moved on to The Walker in the Shadows which I liked even more.

Pat Robbins lives with her college-going son, Mark in an old house in Maryland. She is slowly recovering from the loss of her loving husband, Jerry, one year back, and is doing her best to bring up her son single-handedly. Her husband had been a connoisseur of antiques and architecture and had been instrumental in buying and redecorating the old house. The house just beside theirs is a mirror image of their house, having been built together in the nineteenth century for two sisters. In the present day, the house has an unkept appearance due to the neglect of its owners and is inhabited only by an old and cranky caretaker, Hiram.

When the book starts, Pat comes to know that the house next door has finally been sold and the new family is about to move in. It seems her new neighbours are the Friedrichs family - a pretty, young girl named Kathy and her stern and overprotective father, Josef. Mark takes one look at Kathy and falls head over heels in love with her and she appears to reciprocate his feelings too. However, the fly in the ointment is the rude and unwelcoming Josef, who resents Mark and discourages Pat's overtures of friendship.

But things are about to change. The new occupants of the house seem to have awakened an evil presence that appears in Kathy's room every night at one a.m. and tries to harm Kathy. It reeks of malice and destroys everything that comes in its path. Circumstances compel the two families to get together to solve the identity of the ghost and what it wants. The rest of the book is about how they delve into the past and try to find a way to stop the ghost which seems to be gaining in power as the nights progress.

I loved the interactions between the characters, especially between the older and the younger generations. Mark is intuitively clever and in his zeal to protect Kathy, reads a lot of old books and diaries belonging to the Civil War era. Pat tries alternatively to curb Mark's enthusiasm and cope with the evil looming over both the houses. Josef injects a note of rationality and maturity into Mark's often wild theories. Kathy is sweet and charming and takes it all in a spirit of adventure. What I liked were the witty dialogues and observations infused with Barbara Michaels' trademark humour - for example, how Mark keeps devouring enormous quantities of food despite the peril they are in,  how Mark's so-called guard dog Jud is terrified of ghosts and so on. I also liked the mystery element - the research into the past of Maryland gradually reveals secrets about the two families that inhabited the twin houses in the nineteenth century. A couple of good twists at the end left me pleasantly surprised and very happy that I had picked up this book :)

This book has further whetted my appetite for ghostly mysteries and I am off to read more hitherto unexplored Barbara Michaels books! Looks like my gothic reading phase is here to stay :)