While they write in different genres, authors like Fiona Davis, Simone St James and Sarah Beth Durst all hit a similar mark for me – novels that I know will be at minimum solid and dependable, sometimes even more, and all authors still have a bit of a back catalogue left for me. Sometimes you discover an author and immediately devour all their work. With these authors, I’m slowly working my way through but they are my fall back plans when I am not sure what to read so I am also not rushing to complete them.
Simone St. James almost didn’t make that list for me – I really didn’t like her first novel, The Haunting of Maddy Clare, very much and it took me years to give her another shot. Her highs for me have been The Broken Girls and The Sun Down Motel, but this one is worth the read.
She has quite a few novels that are set in post World War I England, and looking at her novels, I think it’s primarily her earlier novels that use this setting. And it makes sense – England in general was likely rather haunted during that period, even without the ghosts. Some of her other ones, including the ones I mentioned as my favorites, are set in later time periods and in the US.
This one is set 3 years after the end of World War I, and Jo Manders, the narrator, is still grieving her husband. It doesn’t help that he was never declared dead, his body never found, so there is a level of uncertainty that complicates the grief. She is also struggling financially since she doesn’t qualify for a widow’s pension and pays significant hospital bills for her mother who has suffered from mental illness all of Jo’s life. Her childhood was filled with her mother’s ups and downs, and inability to tell truth from fiction.
For the last 3 months, Jo has been traveling Europe as her husband’s aunt’s companion, and as the novel begins, it is time to go back to the family home to prepare for cousin Martin’s homecoming. Jo quickly understands why her employer has spent so much time away as the home is haunted by the daughter’s death four years previously. And as Jo soon comes to discover, potentially also by the girl’s actual ghost, inspiring her to investigate her death, currently viewed as an accident or suicide.
It’s a straightforward enough premise and mixed into it is family tragedy, the emotional and mental scars of war, and a changing world.