She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past. Ware's novels continue to evoke comparison to Agatha Christie they certainly have that classic flavor despite the contemporary settings. The isolation of Trepassen House, its magpies, and its anachronistic housekeeper cultivate a dull sense of horror. She uses tarot readings to hint at the supernatural, but at its heart, this is a very human mystery. Ware continues to hone her gift for the slow unspooling of unease and mystery, developing a consistent sense of threat that’s pervasive and gripping.
Hal just has to figure out exactly who this girl was…without getting herself killed. As Hal desperately tries to keep up her charade of belonging to the family, she realizes that the malevolent atmosphere of Trepassen House has strong roots in the past, when a young girl came to live there, fell in love, and was imprisoned in her bedroom. There she meets several possible uncles and a creepy old housekeeper right out of a Daphne du Maurier novel, all against the backdrop of a run-down mansion. So when she receives a letter saying she's been named in the will of, possibly, an unknown grandmother, she decides to travel to Cornwall, despite fearing that it’s probably all a mistake. Worse still, she’s under threat from a loan shark who’s come to collect the interest on an earlier debt. Her mother died in a hit-and-run several years before, and in her grief, Hal has drifted into a solitary and impecunious life. In Ware’s ( The Lying Game, 2017, etc.) fourth novel in as many years, Harriet “Hal” Westaway is barely making ends meet as a tarot reader on the Brighton Pier.
Is it a case of mistaken identity, or will it reveal some truth about her family? A young woman receives notice of a mysterious bequest.
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