The London Seance Society by Sarah Penner

October 15, 2023

The London Seance Society by Sarah Penner

After her sister was murdered on Halloween, Lenna Wickes travels to Paris to study with Vaudeleine D'Allaire, a famous medium who specializes in conjuring the ghosts of murder victims to solve their cases. In London, the head of the London Seance Society (a men's club) had coincidentally also been murdered on Halloween. The vice president of the society asks the two women to travel to London to conduct a seance to solve the man's murder, but the two women also plan a seance to solve the murder of Lenna's sister. But the more Lenna and Vaudeleine dig around, the more they suspect that the society is a fraud.

This was part of my seasonal reading for Halloween. I started with the eARC but switched to the audiobook, which I much preferred. The London Seance Society is loosely based on The Ghost Club, which still exists in London today. It took a long time to get to the seance and the solution wasn't that interesting, and the narrative dragged. There is also some LGBTQ tossed in rather casually. This is mainly historical fiction and anyone reading this expecting ghosts and scary things will be disappointed. It's about as creepy as that Long Island Medium television show.

Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for providing an eARC for review.

19th century seance

Daisy Darker by Alice Feeney

November 14, 2022

Daisy Darker by Alice Feeney

Children's author Beatrice Darker is celebrating her 80th birthday on Halloween, and her family is gathering at her house on an isolated island off the coast of Cornwall. Once it's high tide in the early evening, the house will be cut off from land. Her son Frank, his ex-wife Nancy (who Beatrice is actually closer to than her son), their three daughters Rose, Lily and Daisy, and Lily's daughter Trixie are largely estranged from each other, so this will be the first time that the whole family is together in a long time. It will be an uncomfortable gathering at best. But in the middle of the night, one family member is found dead and it appears someone plans to pick off another one every hour.

A review in one sentence: And Then There Were None meets The Sixth Sense. Even the book cover is a rip-off from Agatha Christie. It kept me reading right up until the disappointing ending. At least the dog is okay at the end.

The Cornwall coast

The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel

February 23, 2020

The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel

Located on a remote bay on Vancouver Island, the luxury Hotel Caiette caters to a wealthy clientele in search of a reprieve from their daily lives in the corporate world.  Super-rich financier Jonathan Alkaitis owns the hotel but his wealth is built on a house of cards:  his investment firm is actually a giant Ponzi scheme that he has been running for decades.

I wasn’t initially interested in reading a book about a Ponzi scheme, but I like the author’s previous book Station Eleven so much that I decided to give her new book a try.  The Glass Hotel is similar in structure to the previous book in that there is a definite “before” and “after” related to a specific event, and the story line wraps around itself, moving from character to character and backward and forward in time.  It is also set in the same world and time as Station Eleven since events from that book are referenced here and at least two of the characters recur.  As in Station Eleven, the beginning is also the ending.

While the basic plot is about the Ponzi scheme and all of the people affected by it, there are a number of sub-plots and the characters are fascinating.  The overall story is hard to summarize since part of the appeal is finding out how the characters connect to each other and what happens to them (it reminded me of the television show Lost in that regard).  Several characters are chameleon-like, reinventing themselves and their lives as needed, if not in reality, then in an alternate universe.

Fraud and facades play a role, not only with the money fund but with relationships and creativity – at one point, Vincent’s brother steals a number of videos that she made and passes them off as his own work (Vincent is female).  Characters often express regret and wonder “what if” and “if I had only,” and imagine a counterlife where they acted differently than they actually did, although their versions of themselves in that parallel universe are not necessarily better people.

I found this to be very enjoyable and recommend it to anyone who reads literary fiction.

Many thanks to Edelweiss and the publisher for providing an e-ARC in return for a review.

Inland by Tea Obreht

August 14, 2019

Inland by Tea Obreht

Orphaned at a young age and wanted for murder in Missouri Territory in 1856, Lurie stumbles upon a shipment of camels being brought to Arizona Territory by the U.S. Army intending to test their use as pack animals in desert areas.  He becomes a cameleer, forming a bond with one particular camel he calls Burke.  Forty years later, Nora Lark and her family are living in the middle of a drought in Arizona Territory.  Nora’s husband, who runs the local newspaper, left the ranch eight days earlier in search of water and hasn’t been heard from since.  Her older sons have gone off to find their father, leaving Nora alone at the ranch with her youngest son, her invalid mother-in-law, and her husband’s cousin who holds seances – even the homestead dogs have disappeared.  Their stories finally intersect in an unexpected way.  Recommended for readers who enjoyed Toni Morrison’s Beloved or Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Tea Obreht writes lush, beautiful prose, and I had been looking forward to reading Inland, but the pace is really slow, plus there are many characters and it takes quite a while to get into the story.  Told from two viewpoints (Lurie and Nora), their stories don’t intersect until the last quarter of the book.  Lurie’s story is fairly linear and contains a good amount of action, while Nora’s story is more stagnant but jumps around a lot in time.  There is a feeling of dread that underlies the text, like the oppressive heat and drought in the Arizona desert.  A number of characters in the book are communicating with the dead or might be dead themselves (not sure how much this element adds to the story).  Certain aspects of the plot come together very late in the last quarter of the book, when a character that has been mentioned frequently (essentially the town bogeyman) finally appears and explains or confirms what has been hinted at throughout the book.  The ending felt rushed, with Nora foreseeing the future after taking a drink of “magic” water.  While other readers may have enjoyed Inland, I was disappointed.