I’m not a great reader of horror/thriller/ghost stories, and I probably would not have read this book were it not a bookgroup selection. I usually read in bed before I go to sleep, and I didn’t particularly look forward to reading an unsettling ghost story last thing at night- not that I believe in ghosts.
Neither did Rowan Caine, the main protagonist of the book, who took up a very-well paid nannying job in the Scottish highlands in an old, isolated mansion, renovated throughout with high-tech surveillance and appliances. When she first arrived at her new position nannying four girls, only one of whom was away at boarding school, the second-eldest, Maddie, grabbed her around the legs and hissed ‘the ghosts won’t like it’. Left in charge when the parents abruptly leave for a work conference, mysterious things keep happening. She moves from suspecting the other people in the house- the gardener and handyman Jack; the taciturn housekeeper Mrs McKenzie; even the girls themselves- to wondering if it is the house itself that is a malevolent presence. Despite its high-tech renovation where everything is controlled electronically, the house has a long-ago history of a dead child, rumoured to be murdered by her own father who poisoned her by plants in his experimental poison garden. Certainly there has been a string of nannies who have fled the house after just a few weeks or even day’s employment, leading to the owners, Sandra and Bill Elincourt, offering such a large salary and seeking an immediate start.
There are all the elements of a ghost story here: the big isolated house, the gardener and housekeeper, an attic with a hidden door, a poison garden and enigmatic, silent children. But the technology adds a new level of surveillance and wariness to the situation as Rowan feels that she is being watched constantly, and her employers able to speak to her as disembodied voices from speakers, when she doesn’t expect it.
What I liked most about the book was the use of the frame story. The book is written as a series of letters written by Rowan from jail, where she is being held after being charged with murder. She is writing to an attorney, Mr Wrexham, seeking his help as defense lawyer in her upcoming court case. The letters are short at first, but become gradually longer, and indeed you forget after a while that you are reading her letter, told solely from her perspective. There’s a twist at the end – what ghost story would not have a twist?- and the whole premise of the story shifts on its foundations. I do have some questions about the end, but it was executed very deftly and made you rethink everything else that you had deduced about the story previously.
It’s not high literature by any means, as a cheeky spin on the ghost story genre, but I found myself sitting up in the loungeroom until late at night finishing it (and not just because bookgroup was the day after next). I enjoyed it as a bit of a romp, with a frisson of fear and tension – just not just before going to sleep, that’s all.
My rating: 7.5/10
Sourced from: Yarra Plenty Regional Library Book Group Service
Read because Rosanna Readers (ex ‘Ladies Who Say Oooh’) bookgroup selection.
The Resident Judge of Port Phillip 