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!