Bingo Square: B (Book)
This wasn’t my favorite St. James, though it was still an entertaining read. But when reading a Simone St. James novel, I guess I just want a bit more ghost story to it all. Of course there is a ghost and a supernatural connection because it is after all a novel by Simone St. James but after a spooky set up in the beginning, the supernatural elements feel a bit less relevant for the plot than in some of her other novels.
Shea, the main character, is a 29 year old woman who lives in the town she grew up as a receptionist at a doctor’s office. In the evening, she runs a true crime blog – she has a brush with a criminal when she was a young girl and it has shaped her interests since then. When she recognizes Beth Greer at her day job, she pursues her out of the office and asks to interview her. Beth, a rich heiress, was infamous in the town 40 years before when she was tried and acquitted for the murder of two men.
Surprisingly, Beth agrees to an interview, and the novel follows the usual dual narrative structure, splitting between 1977 (the year of the murders), and 2017, with a few jumps even earlier into the time line as more secrets are revealed.
There is no question that there are ghosts in the house – Shea’s tape recorder catches whispers during the interviews and weird things happen at the house during the interviews. A lot of Simone St. James’s other novels the ghosts are part of the reason for the plot or crucial to the resolution of the plot; in this novel, while the ghosts exist, you could easily have the same novel without them. Beth and Shea are both characters that are haunted by their pasts, it’s just that in Beth’s case, it goes beyond the psychological ghosts and includes actual ghosts. I felt oddly unsatisfied after reading this one even though the plot came together well and it wasn’t until another review pointed out how differently she used the supernatural here that it clicked- this plot was really more something I would expect from a regular mystery novel than a ghost story because you could have easily had almost the same story and only had metaphorical ghosts.