THE FATE OF MERCY ALBAN (Wendy Webb)

I just finished Wendy Webb's latest and chills are still running up and down my spine.  I might also be a little bit afraid of the possibility of investigating strange noises in my house at night!  There have been so many incidents of people feeling a draft or a touch on their arm or smelling the special perfume of someone long gone from this world.  My son once heard a voice saying "get out" on a video that he and a couple of friends made in a cemetery while looking for a relative's grave.  None of them heard the voice while they were filming!

The Fate of Mercy Alban revolves around Alban House, an old estate on the shores of Lake Michigan, built in the late 19th century by an Irish immigrant who found success in the new world.  When 70-year-old Adele Alban, widow of Johnny Alban, suddenly succumbs to a heart attack, her daughter Grace returns home along with her daughter Amity after an absence of twenty years to bury her mother.  Despite her long estrangement from the family, Grace is an Alban through and through and takes up the reins of running the estate without hesitation.  Alban House is full of old family retainers and secret passages, and has a history of unexplained tragedies, including the drowning of Grace's own brothers twenty years before, the death of Mercy Alban at a young age, and the mysterious disappearance of Aunt Fate in 1956 and, on the same night, the suicide of famous journalist and family friend David Collville committed suicide.  Alban House is alive with the spirits of the dead and it is not long before Grace finds herself  immersed in mysteries of the past, mysteries that might better be left undisturbed.  When a journalist named Harris Peters arrives at the funeral with an elderly woman whom they all believe to be the long missing Aunt Fate, Grace finds her family history suddenly full of unanswered questions. Ghosties and ghoulies and things that go bump in the night...this novel has it all.  If you love a good Gothic, check this one out!

THE MOURNING HOURS (Paula Teick Deboard)

Imagine that your family, established for generations in a small Midwestern farming community, is suddenly the focus of interest in a criminal investigation. The Hammerstrom family is thrown into a storm of controversy when Johnny Hammerstrom's girlfriend, the beautiful and popular Stacy Lemke, vanishes into a blizzard after Johnny's truck slides off the road after a date.  When search crews find no trace of the 16-year-old, Johnny is the logical suspect in her disappearance, especially after no one can confirm the couple's whereabouts in the hours before Johnny arrives home, his hand bleeding and his truck in a ditch.  Even 9-year-old Kirsten, the narrator, doubts her brother's innocence.  As the family endures relentless press attention and escalating attacks from the community, the search for Stacy fruitlessly continues.  Eventually even the family, with the exception of Johnny's father, John, begin to look to Johnny to somehow provide answers and relieve the relentless shunning from their neighbors and former friends.

Although the ending was a bit less satisfying than I expected it to be, I couldn't put this novel down once I got started.  Any family could  end up as the Hammerstrom's did, which is the really scary thing.  None of us knows how much pressure we are capable of enduring and what unknown facets lie beneath the surface of  the people that we believe we know the best.  This is a thriller well worth reading!

MORNING GLORY (Sarah Jio)

What a beautiful, heart-wrenching story!  Morning Glory is actually 2 stories separated by 50 years. Ada Santorini moves from New York to Boat Street in Seattle to escape an unspeakable tragedy that has altered her life forever.  In her rented houseboat she finds a trunk filled with mementos from 50 years earlier, including theater tickets and a wedding gown.  She discovers that the trunk belonged to Penny Wentworth, the young bride who lived in the houseboat and disappeared without a trace in 1959. Ada also finds a friend (and, perhaps, the key to discovering how to live again) in Alex, who lives on a neighboring houseboat.

The story alternates between Ada in the present day and, in the past, Penny, a glowing young bride who soon discovers that her artist husband has little time to focus on their life together. Weird neighbors, a neighbor named Collin with a sympathetic shoulder to cry on, and a lonely boy named Jimmy define Penny's life on Boat Street.  When Penny vanishes, never to be heard from again, after a neighborhood cocktail party, the neighbors form a pact of silence, vowing never to reveal what they believe they know about the tragedy.  Can Ada, 50 years later, solve the mystery of what happened to Penny?

Jio's book is a wonderful mixture of mystery and love story, moving from one end of the  emotional spectrum to the other.  You'll cry, but love every minute of this novel.  

THE VACATIONERS (Emma Straub)

The Post family's vacation to Mallorca is, well, complicated.  Franny and Jim, married for thirty years, are in the midst of a marital crisis brought on by Jim's affair with a beautiful summer intern and subsequent loss of his job.  Son Bobby, a Florida real estate agent with a much older girlfriend, has gotten into financial trouble and is being pressured by his girlfriend, Carmen, to ask his parents for help.  Seventeen-year-old Sylvia plans to lose her virginity before returning to the USA to begin college at Brown University and family friend Charles and his husband Lawrence are conflicted about adopting a child.  Written from multiple perspectives, Straub's story is an enjoyable panorama of family dysfunction, love, compromise, and forgiveness.

Every family has disagreements, failed communications, secrets, and frustrations.  The key to survival is commitment, and the Posts, while enduring some major crises and minor growing pains, are committed to one another.  All you need is love!  As for the vacation, you'll have to read this to find out how that turns out.

MURDER ON THE CLIFFS (Joanna Challis)

This is the first in Challis's Daphne Du Maurier mystery series.  Having previously read "Villa of Death," I can venture to say that the "mystery" aspect of the series improves as the series progresses.  I enjoyed the character of Daphne Du Maurier.  Having read a bit about her life and being familiar with some of her work, I think that Challis does an excellent job of portraying the writer's personality. As for the story itself, I feel like there were some weak areas, although the atmosphere was great and  I loved Ewe, Daphne's mother's old nurse, whom Daphne stays with when she visits a small Cornish village in order to gain access to  some historical documents in a local abbey.

While out walking on the beach toward Padthaway, the home of the local aristocrats, Daphne comes across the dead body of a beautiful woman, dressed in a nightgown and shoeless. I mention the lack of shoes because it is brought up several times during the course of the story as if the shoes are an important clue to the murder, but I don't quite get why.  Daphne also finds a teenage girl, Lianne Hartley,  daughter of the Hartley family of Padthaway, looking at the body.  Lianne's brother, the handsome Lord David, was set to marry the deceased in a few days.  The victim, former kitchen maid Victoria Bastion, has died of causes unknown.  It could have been an accident, but was it, in fact, a murder? There was no love lost between Victoria and her future mother-in law, and Lord David himself seem unusually complacent about the loss of his fiance.  It was a bit disconcerting that Daphne immediately began imagining herself as Lord David's future wife before the body was even cold, and he seemed to be interested in her as well (quick recovery from his grief).  One thing I did enjoy about this novel was Daphne and her references to her future novel, "Rebecca."  I'm not sure I would recommend reading this for the mystery, but it might be interesting if you are a fan of Du Maurier!

THE FORGOTTEN SEAMSTRESS (Liz Trenow)

OK.  I admit that I've been so busy reading lately that I haven't had time to WRITE about the wonderful books that have come why way in the past few weeks.  This one was a great, a mix of real and imaginary characters and situations that make you wonder, "Could this have really happened?  DID it happen?"

Maria Romano, an orphan, is chosen at a young age to become a seamstress for royalty at Buckingham Palace during the Edwardian era.  Her exceptionally  fine needlework and youthful naivete result in a friendship with the Prince of Wales, and she finally embarks on an affair with the young man, falling deeply in love with him.  During the course of her employment at the palace she finds scraps of royal wedding silks, specially woven for the future queen, and begins to create a beautiful patchwork quilt depicting events in her own life.  When it is discovered that she is carrying the prince's child she is sent to a mental hospital where she is told after giving birth that her child has died.  In a horrifying depiction of the treatment of women in the early 20th century, she is confined to the hospital for 50 years, diagnosed as a fantasist who has created the whole story of her affair with the prince.

Years later, Caroline inherits the quilt, handed down from her grandmother, and discovers from a designer friend that the fabric is rare and royal. so Caroline sets out to discover who created the beautiful quilt and how it ended up in the hands of her grandmother.

Trenow expertly weaves together the stories of Maria and Caroline.  She uses a graduate students's interviews with Maria (as a former mental patient during the 1970's) and  intersperses them with Maria's story in early 1900's and Caroline's quest to trace the history of the quilt while also trying to pull together her own life and career.  The Forgotten Seamstress is a wonderful mix of historic and contemporary fiction with a fascinating dash of quilting thrown in.

POISONED GROUND (Sandra Parshall)

I was just thinking about what words would best describe Poisoned Ground.  It's a mystery, it's a thriller, it's a political, neighbor vs. neighbor tug-of war over money and property, and it's a love story.  It is also the last in Parshall's Rachel Goddard series.  I can understand the thinking behind this decision.  The author herself commented that she didn't want Mason County to become the next Cabot Cove, and I suppose it is pretty unrealistic for one veterinarian to end up in jeopardy over and over again.  I will look forward to reading Parshall's stand-alone thrillers in the years to come, but there will always be a soft spot in my heart for Rachel Goddard and Tom Bridger.

In this book a development company is looking to build a giant, upscale spa in Mason County, expecting to cater to a rich and famous clientele.  The problem is that they need to buy up land in order to accomplish their goal, which will surely ruin both the landscape and the charm of the area.  Offering exorbitant amounts of money for local properties, the developer pits neighbor against neighbor.  Naturally, those who need the money or are thinking about moving on or retiring are starry-eyed over the prospect of the financial security of selling, while those who wish to remain on their property, continuing to enjoy the land where their parents and grandparents lived and worked, have no interest in the spa project.  The catch is that it's an all or nothing deal.  The developers want ALL the land or the deal is cancelled, so when someone starts killing off land owners, the natural speculation is that the deaths are related to the spa deal.

Parshall, as usual, maintains suspense and keeps the reader guessing from the first page to the last.  I had a hard time putting this novel down once I started.  The sad thing is, though, that I can't wait for the next installment, but there won't be one!  I guess I'll survive as long as Sandra Parshall comes though with her promised stand-alone thrillers.  Hopefully by this time next year I'll be writing enthusiastically about one of those!