My top reads of 2016

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 :)

All things gothic!

Book review: Valley of Nightmares by Jane Godman

Imagine my delight when I found that this book contained all the elements a true gothic romance should have! Young governess. Tick. Frightened child. Tick. Brooding, enigmatic employer (who may be the hero or the villain). Tick. Crumbling, old house in the middle of nowhere. Tick. Nightmares filled with a sense of impending doom. Tick. Creepy noises and eerie howling at night. Tick. Celtic legends. Tick. Mysterious dancing lights on the mountain. Tick. It was my lucky day indeed when I found this book on Goodreads! 

It is 1938, the eve of the Second World War, and Lilly Divine is earning a living as a burlesque dancer in a London nightclub. She starts having recurring nightmares of being chased by a sinister figure and in these dreams, she always sees a small girl who is being pursued by the same hunter.One day, her best friend and colleague, Ricky, is found dead - an incident which leaves her sad and determined to leave her ignominious career behind. Her chance comes unexpectedly in the form of Gethin Taran, a patron of the club who is looking for a governess for his eight-year-old niece, Ceri. Apparently, Taran House is a bit remote, on the foothills of Mount Taran, and not many young women are willing to venture out there in the wilderness. 

When Lilly arrives in Taran House, she is drawn to its sad, neglected aura - as if the house has been waiting for something or someone to awaken it. There is a crumbling clock tower at the top of the old house, which somehow fills Lilly with a sense of foreboding. But what shocks her most is Ceri, her charge - Ceri is the same girl Lilly has been seeing in her nightmares! Lilly feels an instant connection to Ceri and it seems Ceri recognizes her too. As Lilly starts settling in, she hears strange noises at night from the clock tower room above her bedroom, sees swirling, dancing lights on Mount Taran and hears eerie howling of hounds at night. She soon learns of the local Celtic legends which say that Mount Taran is a mystic place where the devil and his undead huntsmen ride through every night, along with their hounds of death. 

Things start getting dangerous as several attempts are made on Ceri's life and Lilly's bedroom is ransacked. A mysterious big, black dog appears one day, befriends Ceri and seems to protect both of them. A young man who is staying in the village nearby starts showing an interest in Lilly. In the midst of all this, Lilly develops a strong and unwelcome fascination for her mysterious employer, Gethin, in the true tradition of gothic novels :) There are supernatural elements thrown in, along with a bit of WWII intrigue - a missing top-secret letter, a dead evil twin, a jilted fiancee, a lake which drowns those of unpure heart, gypsy caravans and last but not the least, the house which may or may not be evil.

What I liked was the author's descriptive prose which brought out both the beauty of the surroundings and the pervasive sense of doom. Lilly is a refreshing take on the Gothic heroine, she is neither shy nor a dewy-eyed innocent; she tackles things head-on and speaks her mind. Her interactions with Gethin and her internal monologue are sometimes funny, and they nicely balance the eerie atmosphere of the rest of the book.

All in all, a nice, suspenseful, creepy, supernatural read - perfect for curling up with on a lazy evening, accompanied by a cup of steaming tea :)

Ghosts of memories

Book review: Haunted Ground by Irina Shapiro

Imagine having a strange fascination for a country you have never visited, imagine feeling a pull towards a house you don't even know exists, imagine feeling a certainty that you belong to a particular place more than anywhere else in the world. That is how Alexandra Maxwell (or Lexi as she prefers to be called) has always felt - that she somehow belongs to England, to a place steeped in history. 

Her dreams of visiting England have always been ignored by her American parents, but they become a reality when her father passes away, leaving her the family business. She promptly sells off the business and flies to England to buy a house which she can convert into her own Bed & Breakfast.

That is how she lands up in a small, remote village in Lincolnshire not even on the map and discovers the house that she has always unconsciously searched for:

The house loomed in front of me. tall and gray; the stone walls bleached by decades of sunshine and rain and buffeted by wind, the south side dressed in a thick coat of ivy that crept almost as far as the gabled roof. The half-lowered blinds in the upstairs windows gave the impression of hooded eyes, wearily watching me as I stood there on the lawn, my whole being flooded with joy and a sudden sense of deja vu. 
This was it; this was the house I'd been looking for. I didn't know where I would find it, but I knew exactly what it would be like, and how I would feel when I finally saw it.

Lexi discovers a faded sign announcing that the house is up for sale and immediately contacts the estate agent to buy it. The agent, Paula, is overjoyed to have sold off the property which had apparently been on the market for a long time. She tells Lexi that the property had belonged to an old lady named Mrs. Hughes whose ancestors had lived in the house since its construction in the seventeenth century. The house is bordered by trees and an old creek, beside which Lexi spots a mysterious ruin. It seems the ruin is part of the property and the old owner even left a stipulation in her will that the ruin is not to be demolished. The ruin obviously is an older structure than the house but no one seems to know for what purpose it was built or who it originally belonged to.

From here, the novel starts alternating between the past (1650) and present, with two different story lines - the seventeenth century plot about a soldier named Brendan Carr in Oliver Cromwell's army, and the present-day story about Lexi's first days in the house. In the past, Brendan is disillusioned with Oliver Cromwell's cruel battles against the Scottish and deserts the army. He returns home, only to find that his father is dead, his younger brother has usurped his property and his fiancee, his beloved sister Meg is widowed and his mother is on the deathbed. His scheming brother, Jasper, throws him out of the house and  sends men to murder him on the highway. Brendan is able to kill the assassins but is severely wounded in the process. He somehow manages to reach his uncle Caleb's house in Lincolnshire, where an old priest gives him shelter and a young girl called Rowan nurses him back to health. Even as a tender relationship starts growing between Brendan and the mute Rowan, they are surrounded by enemies and traitors - Jasper, Rowan's betrothed Stephen and spies sent by Cromwell to capture Rowan.

Oliver Cromwell

In the present, Lexi hires a contracting agency owned by a handsome Scot, Aidan Mackay, to restore and redesign the house. As Aidan and his workers dispose off the old furniture, Lexi slowly starts settling down in the house. She notices a man who emerges from the ruin every evening to pray in front of an old tree and then goes back dejectedly inside the ruin. One night, she wakes up to see a faint candle burning on the second floor of the ruin and a man, similar to the one she had seen earlier, reading a book. But in the morning, when she and Aidan go into the ruin, they find that the second floor and stairs no longer exist and even the roof has caved in; no living person could have actually climbed up to the second floor. So who is the man Lexi had seen? Why does Lexi keep seeing the same sad man every day at twilight? If he is a ghost, is he in some way tied to the ruin? Why does he seem to repent in front of the tree endlessly? One day, while digging up an old wall in the basement of the house, Aidan's workers find a locked room which it seems hasn't been opened in centuries. They break down the door to find a coffin with a skeleton inside. The name 'Brendan Carr' is engraved on the coffin, but no one in the village or vicinity seems to know who Brendan Carr or his descendants were. 

To add to the mystery of the past, there seems to be a mystery in the present too about Lexi's background. Some old residents of the village seem to recognize Lexi and express happiness that she has finally found her way back to where she belongs. Lexi is confused by what they mean but no one wants to explain their strange comment. She comes to know purely by chance that a murder had taken place in her house some twenty years back - when Mrs. Hughes' daughter Kelly was murdered by her husband. She is driven to know more about how she is connected to the house. Who is Lexi really? What secrets are people hiding from her? Who can lead her to the truth?

As skeletons in the closet are revealed, both literally and figuratively, Lexi realizes that she needs to find the answers to the questions plaguing her past and present, so that she can move on. She gets support from Aidan in this and there is a nice little romance between the two, but this is largely overshadowed by the poignant and doomed love story of Brendan and Rowan in the seventeenth century. How are the two story lines tied together? How are the ruin and the house connected? What eventually happens to Brendan and Rowan? Are the ghosts of the past and the present laid to rest at last by Lexi? To find out, you have to read "Haunted Ground" yourself :) I liked the book and would recommend it to lovers of paranormal or past-present mysteries.

Of visions and illusions, mediums and magic!

Book review: Born of Illusion by Teri Brown

I've always been fascinated by seances and spirit mediums, tarot readings and magical illusions. I have read quite a few books on this theme set in the Jazz Age when seances and mediums were all the rage, especially because of the number of grieving widows and parents who wanted to contact the spirits of soldiers killed in World War I. The books set in this time period that I really enjoyed are "The Other Side of Midnight" by Simone St. James and "Things Half in Shadow" by Alan Finn. I also liked Jaime Lee Moyer's Delia Martin series about a woman in San Francisco of 1906 who can see and communicate with ghosts. Hence it is small wonder that I picked up Teri Brown's "Born of Illusion" which promised to be about a young and gifted illusionist experiencing frightening visions. While this is part of a series, I figured out from Goodreads reviews that each book is a standalone novel and this one is undoubtedly the best of the lot.

"Born of Illusion" is about a young girl, Anna Van Housen, whose mother is a popular spirit medium in post-World War I New York. Anna has had a lonely and unconventional childhood, moving from place to place, while her mother performed in physic shows in various small towns and cities. Her mother, Marguerite, is a stunning beauty who is always hungry for fame and fortune but has no real psychic abilities. She relies on tricks and fake illusions to make her stage shows and seances seem real. Only Anna knows her secret. Marguerite has also changed her real name to gain popularity and has spread rumours that Anna is the illegitimate daughter of the famous magician, Harry Houdini, and even Anna doesn't know if that's  true or another of her mother's elaborate deceptions. Anna is fascinated by magic and has taught herself various magic tricks over the years. Her dream is to perform independent of her mother and become an acknowledged illusionist, which is a difficult thing to do in an age when female magicians are rare and the ones that do practice are not taken seriously.

Source: pininterest.com

When the book starts, Anna and her mother have recently moved to New York as a result of her mother having found a well-connected manager, Jacques. Anna is happy that their days of barely scraping through and evading the law seem to be over and that they are now able to live in a well-to-do neighbourhood. Anna is the responsible one in the family, knowing that her flighty and unreliable mother is incapable to being prudent in money or household matters. She has a strange love-hate relationship with her mother - she loves Marguerite but is wary of her controlling and grasping nature. Anna agrees to be part of her mother's stage show in New York, where she demonstrates magical card tricks as the opening act before her mother's psychic act starts. She has always known that she has more psychic talent than her mother and struggles to keep that fact hidden from her jealous mother, as her act gains more popularity. She increasingly wonders if her powers have been inherited from her alleged father, the mysterious Houdini, and feels a strong desire to meet him in person.

Anna has more secrets that she has kept from her mother and everyone else - she is able to sense the emotions of people through touch and sometimes sees uncanny visions of impending disasters such as the sinking of the Titanic and the Spanish influenza epidemic. Her visions suddenly increase in frequency and this time they are frighteningly personal - she sees her mother in danger and feels herself drowning and unable to save her mother. She also starts experiencing emotions of others more strongly, even without touching them. During one of her mother's seances, Anna is unexpectedly able to communicate with a spirit - something that she has never able to do before. To add to her constant feeling of impending doom, the spirit Walter warns her that her life is in danger.

Source: pininterest.com

Anna's personal life is also in turmoil. She meets an attractive young neighbour Cole, who she feels a strange connection to. Her senses are heightened whenever Cole is near, but she is not able to trust him completely as he seems to have his own ulterior motive in befriending her. Anna is suspicious of her mother's manager Jacques, whose emotions are obscure to her even when she touches him. She also meets Owen, Jacques' dashing nephew, who seems to be interested in courting her. She accidentally comes across Harry Houdini and cannot restrain herself from revealing her illusionist abilities to him.

Things start becoming more complicated when some of her mother's clients start acting weirdly, she discovers the existence of a society which investigates paranormal abilities and realizes that Houdini himself is bent on unmasking phony mediums. Anna is caught between trying to protect her mother, discovering whether Houdini knows about her existence and fighting her growing attraction to Cole. All the while, she continues to question whether her own mother loves her enough and whether she will ever be able to move out of her mother's shadow.

Who can Anna truly trust - Cole or Owen? Can she reveal her true abilities to Dr. Bennett, an erstwhile member of the Society for Psychical Research? What is Jacques' hidden agenda? How much can she reveal to her own mother? What are her visions warning her about? Can she stop these events from happening in the future? All these questions start plaguing Anna and the reader. Though I managed to figure out the culprit before the final revelation, it was still an engrossing read and one I would not hesitate to recommend to anyone who enjoys a light, paranormal mystery about the coming-of-age of a likable heroine with unusual psychic abilities.

A sinful and addictive dark chocolate!

You may have noticed that I have been absent for full five days. In case you are wondering about the cause of my absence from this blog, I had disappeared behind a magical portal opened by a book series that was as sinfully addictive as rich, dark chocolate - Juliet Dark's "Fairwick Chronicles":

For the uninitiated, Juliet Dark is the alter ego of the acclaimed writer of gothic mysteries, Carol Goodman. The same series is also available with alternate titles and with the author's real name on the cover.

"This is where all stories start, on the edge of a dark wood.."

- proclaims the summary of "Incubus" or "The Demon Lover", the first book of the Fairwick Chronicles, and it was enough to send a delicious shiver of anticipation down my spine! After four days of reading the three books in a mad rush, I have finally managed to extricate myself from the haze induced by this series Now that I'm back to my normal state, the time has come to review it :).

Book review: Fairwick Chronicles trilogy by Carol Goodman

This series is a curious, genre-bending, riveting mixture of gothic, paranormal, romance and fantasy - a departure in many ways from Goodman's standard genre, yet retaining her trademark writing style. The first book is the most creative of the series, and shows the author's love for old gothic romances such as Charlotte Bronte's "Jane Eyre", Emily Bronte's "Wuthering Heights", Ann Radcliffe's "The Mysteries of Udolpho" and Daphne du Maurier's "Rebecca". Goodman pays a fitting tribute to the various facets of the gothic genre, both through her heroine Callie's college lectures and through her story.

Cailleach McFay, better known as Callie, has a doctorate in folklore and gothic fiction (I want to study this too!) and has written a popular book on demon lovers in gothic literature. She has been fascinated by fairy tales and folklore since childhood, not surprising considering that her late parents were archaeologists exploring Celtic myths. As a teenager, she had imagined that she had a shadowy companion who came to meet her at night in her dreams. To exorcise the dreams, she had taken up gothic literature as her research area, and ended up specializing in it.

Gothic romance; Source: coolchaser.com

As the book begins, Callie is offered a teaching post at the remote Fairwick college, a lesser known village near New York, in the shadows of the Catskill mountains and bordered by a thousand acres of virgin forest. The description of the village and the college are atmospheric, and I could alomost visualize the vine-covered gothic library and the ivy-shrouded Victorian cottages.

As Callie wanders around Fairwick for the first time, the forest affects her in a strange way:

I paused for a moment at the edge of a narrow trail, peering into the shadows. Even though the day was bright, the woods were dark. Vines lopped from tree to tree, filling every crevice and twisting into curious shapes....

A wind came up and blew out of the woods toward me, carrying with it the chill scent of pine needles, damp earth and something sweet. Honeysuckle?...

I closed my eyes and inhaled deeply. The breeze curled around me, tickling the damp at the back of my neck and lifting the ends of my long hair like a hand caressing me.

Callie sees an old house covered in honeysuckle, right at the edge of the forest, somehow merging with the woods:

It was hidden from the road by a dense, overgrown hedge. Even without the hedge, the house would have been hard to see because it blended in so well with its surroundings....The honeysuckle from the forest had encroached over the porch railings..

I stepped a few feet closer and a breeze stirred a loose vine over the door. It waved to me as though it were beckoning me to come closer..

Above the doorway in the pediment, was a wood carving of a man's face, a pagan god of the forest, I thought, from the pinecone wreath resting on his abundant flowing hair. I'd seen a face like it somewhere before...perhaps in a book on forest deities...

I turned to leave. The wind picked up, lifting the green pollen from the porch floor and blowing it into little funnels around my feet as I hurried down the steps...

The vines that were twisted around the porch columns creaked and strained. A loose trailer snapped against my arm as I reached the ground...

When I reached the hedge, I turned around to look back at the house. It gave one more sigh as the wind stopped, its clapboard walls moaning as if sorry to see me go, and then it settled on its foundation and sat back, staring at me.

I couldn't resist myself from quoting that entire passage because after that eerie description, I was so enthralled that my gothic-loving heart was doing a joyful little jig!:)

Source: www.wvexplorer.com

Callie, of course, can't  resist the pull of the house and realizing that it's up for sale, she impulsively buys it. Her acquaintances, the inn-keeper Diana Hart, and the college dean, Dean Book, warn her that the house is haunted. Apparently it has remained uninhabited for the last twenty years, ever since the previous owner died. Before that, it had originally belonged to Dahlia LaMotte, a popular gothic novelist who had written some bodice-ripper romances at the turn of the twentieth century before they went out of fashion.

Callie begins to have vivid dreams of a man made of moonlight and shadows, and her room is filled with the fragrance of honeysuckle every night.

Each piece of him took shape and weight as the moonlight touched it. It was as if he were made of shadow and the moonlight was the knife sculpting him into being, each stroke of the knife giving him form...and weight....

He felt like a wave crashing over me, a moonlit wave that sucked me down below the surf and pulled me out into the sea, onto a crest...

I must confess that I had been hesitant to pick up "The Incubus" thinking that it might verge on erotica but I need not have worried. In Goodman's deft hands, the descriptions of the physical aspect of love are poetic and passionate, but never explicit. In fact, true to the style of old gothic romances, the more intimate descriptions are largely left to the imagination. Yet the midnight encounters between Callie and her shadow lover manage to convey a deep and boundless passion, almost bordering on obsession:

I was standing in the dark, on the threshold between shadow and moonlight, where he always waited. And someone was knocking....
The moonlight rushed in with the wind - a wind that smelled like honeysuckle and salt - and circled around me like an angry riptide. 
I'd heard somewhere that if you are drowning, you should relax and let the current take you. I did that now and the current turned warm and carried me down into the darkness,...where he lived.

Callie discovers some old manuscripts of Dahlia LaMotte's work in the attic and finds that Dahlia's writing strangely mirrors her own nightly experiences. She begins to suspect that the house  is truly is haunted by a spectre or the gothic setting is influencing her fertile imagination to an alarming degree. As if that wasn't enough, the residents of Fairwick start acting strangely too, and Callie discovers that no one is as they seem on the surface.

Who is the shadow haunting Callie's dreams? Is he a ghost or a figment of Callie's imagination? Is he the same shadow that Callie used to see when she was young? What connection does he have with Callie? Did Dahlia LaMotte dream of the same man? What secrets are the Fairwick residents hiding? Who is Callie really?

All these questions build up slowly in the mind of the reader, as Goodman unfolds her brilliantly imaginative plot. A cast of intriguing characters is introduced, both young and old, who inhabit Fairwick and are an integral part of its chronicles. There are fairy tales skillfully woven into the story such as the tale of Tam Lin, as well as historical details such as the Scottish plague and witch hunts. There are quite a number of surprising twists in the tale, some which left me shocked and wondering how the author would resolve the resultant mess. Sometimes the sweeping tale does become a bit repetitive like in the second book, or mired in complications like in the third book, but the author expertly manages to pull all the tangled threads together by the end.

Source: www.pininterest.com

What I really liked was that the trilogy evolves into a fascinating saga of star-crossed love - an intensely romantic story spanning magic and reality, encompassing past and present, and spread across continents. To my romance-loving soul, submerging in the story was like indulging in a deep, dark and tempting chocolate, which is sometimes seductive, sometimes sweet and sometimes bitter but which one absolutely can't do without. While the first book is undoubtedly the best in terms of the gothic element, the other two books continue the magical journey of the lovers unknowingly meeting and losing each other, time after time.

What came once here will never come again,
no matter monument nor memory;
all sun-warmed green succumbs to winter's wind...

yet sun will brighten wind so,

one knows that soon green stirs, and wild bees hum.

And summer once more will make winter liar,

but I won't warm. You're all I'll ever desire.

Where does their story start and where does it end? Are they destined to remain separated for an eternity? To know that, you have to read the series :)

Where the living are not really alive and the dead not truly dead

Book review: Lost Among the Living by Simone St. James

Simone St. James is an author whose books I pick up by default, and I've noticed that her plots have progressively got better with every new book that she has written. Hence I had marked April 5 on my calendar as the day her latest book, Lost Among the Living, would be released.  I had expected it to be an engrossing gothic mystery with a paranormal twist, and it didn't disappoint. It also deftly explores the loss, hopelessness and uncertainty felt by wives of missing-in-action soldiers in World War I. While thousands of unnamed soldiers fought for England in foreign lands, their wives and fiancées, unknown to history, waged their own war against grief and abandonment and against a male-dominated society which refused to acknowledge their existence or contribution.  

This book revolves around Jo Manders, whose husband, Alex, is reported missing-in-action in the war. It has been three years since the war ended, but Jo is barely drifting through life, still unable to cope with the despair of losing her husband. In the aftermath of Alex's disappearance, Jo is left to fend for herself and support her mentally unstable mother's upkeep in an asylum.

In flashbacks, it is revealed that Alex had appeared in Jo's dull and dreary life like a blinding flash of light. She was swept off her feet by his concern for her and his ability to deal with any situation. After a whirlwind romance and hasty marriage, when Alex decides to join the RAF, she is left with only a few months of happy memories to cling to. Her grief and inability to move forward in life come across strongly, even as she takes on the demanding role of a companion to Alex's wealthy aunt, Dottie Forsyth, to support her mother.

After a tour of the continent, Dottie and Jo come back to England to Wych Elm House in Sussex, the home of the Forsyth family. It is a large, rambling house at the edge of a dense forest. Jo meets Dottie's estranged husband, Robert, and her ailing son, Martin, who also stay at Wych Elm House.

Source: pininterest.com

Jo soon senses an otherworldly presence in the house - in the corridors, the terrace and in her room. She hears footsteps following her, feels a chill in the house, sees objects mysteriously appear in and disappear from her room and hears the sound of a dog's growling at night. A damp, cold mist seems to follow her, outside and inside the house, leaving dry leaves on the floor of her room, which cannot be seen by anyone but her. 

The mist had stopped moving, I realized. It hovered in the woods, blurred among the trunks of the trees, still and cold. It almost seemed to be watching me. I stared out of the window and watched back.

Source: wallpapersonthe.net

Jo sees startling visions of Frances, Dottie's young daughter who had jumped to her death from the upper terrace of the house. She also has recurring nightmares, often dreaming of the dark forest and sometimes hearing Alex calling out to her. She soon realizes that an undead spirit is trying to convey a message to her. She starts to investigate the events and people surrounding Frances' suicide and stumbles upon the fact that Alex had kept a lot of secrets from her. There are a lot of unanswered questions. Did Frances truly commit suicide? Did she have a real dog named Princer? Did Alex meet his cousin Frances on the day she died? Why are the villagers scared of the woods? What is Martin hiding from Dottie? Is Jo slowly becoming insane like her mother?

Shocking secrets are revealed, there is a major twist and Jo's life changes dramatically yet again. Divulging anything more will take this review into spoiler territory. So all I'm willing to say is that in the end, all mysteries are solved, both Frances' and Jo's ghosts are laid to rest, the house is sold off by the family and everyone moves on in life. After the feeling of despondency that hung over the entire first half of the book, I was very happy that it ended on a positive note, with everything resolved satisfactorily.

This book has managed to finally do what no other book could since February - break me out of my fantasy fascination at last! I am now moving on to more gothic mysteries and historical novels with a vengeance!