Rating: ***
Tags: Fiction, General, Twins, Mystery & Detective, Ghost stories, Literary, Mystery, Family Life, Domestic Fiction, Horror, Thriller, Adult, Ghost, Herbalists, Library, Air Pilots, New Hampshire, Lang:en
Summary
From the bestselling author of The Double Bind, Skeletons at
the Feast, and Secrets of Eden, comes a riveting and dramatic
ghost story. In a dusty corner of a basement in a rambling
Victorian house in northern New Hampshire, a door has long been
sealed shut with 39 six-inch-long carriage
bolts.
The home's new owners are Chip and Emily Linton and their twin
ten-year-old daughters. Together they hope to rebuild their
lives there after Chip, an airline pilot, has to ditch his
70-seat regional jet in Lake Champlain after double engine
failure. Unlike the Miracle on the Hudson, however, most of the
passengers aboard Flight 1611 die on impact or drown. The body
count? Thirty-nine – a coincidence not lost on Chip when
he discovers the number of bolts in that basement door.
Meanwhile, Emily finds herself wondering about the women in
this sparsely populated White Mountain village –
self-proclaimed herbalists – and their interest in her
fifth-grade daughters. Are the women mad? Or is it her husband,
in the wake of the tragedy, whose grip on sanity has become
desperately tenuous? The result is a poignant
and powerful ghost story with all the hallmarks readers have
come to expect from bestselling novelist Chris Bohjalian: a
palpable sense of place, an unerring sense of the demons that
drive us, and characters we care about deeply. The difference
this time? Some of those characters are dead.From the Hardcover
edition.