GIRLS OF BRACKENHILL (2020)

 

Girls of Brackenhill by Kate Moretti

My Rating: 3 of 5 Stars

 

FIRST LINE: "I didn't mean to kill the girl."

 

THE STORY: Hannah's seemingly perfect life with Huck begins to fall apart with a phone call telling her there's been a deadly accident at Brackenhill. During the six hour drive from Virginia to her Aunt and Uncle's home, a mountaintop castle in the Catskills, Hannah remembers the wonderful summers she spent there until the last one when her older sister disappeared without a trace. Should she share her past secrets with Huck?

 

 

WHAT I THOUGHT: Brackenhill itself is a character. It has locked rooms, eerie sounds, banging doors, a scary room-rearranging basement, strange deaths, and ghosts. The castle seems to induce unusual moods and visions. Hannah has survived by hiding secrets and refusing to face the past.At Brackenhill she fixates on trying to find her sister who's been missing for 17 years.

 

Author Kate Moretti sets up a fascinating puzzle for the reader to solve. When I finished the book, I couldn't sleep trying to put all the pieces together. I was glad to be reading on my Kindle so I could search for terms in the book to check for clues I might have missed and they were all there. Perhaps I would have read more carefully if I had approached it that way.

 

BOTTOM LINE: A grown up ghost story for Halloween and beyond. RECOMMENDED.

 

DISCLAIMER: A copy of The Girls of Brackenhill was provided to me by Thomas & Mercer /Net Galley for an honest review.

 

Paperback: 331 pages
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer (November 1, 2020) 

ISBN-10: 1542000084

ISBN-13: 978-1542000086

 

THE AUTHOR:  Kate Moretti is the New York Times Bestselling author of six novels and a novella. Her first novel Thought I Knew You, was a New York Times bestseller. The Vanishing Year was a nominee in the Goodreads Choice Awards Mystery/Thriller category for 2016 and was called "chillingly satisfying." (Publisher's Weekly) with "superb" closing twists (New York Times Book Review). Her books have been translated in over ten different languages and has been optioned for television.

​Kate has worked in the pharmaceutical industry for twenty years as a scientist and enjoys traveling and cooking. She lives in Pennsylvania in an old farmhouse with her husband, two children and no known ghosts. Her lifelong dream is to find a secret passageway.