Sebastian Gage returns home to battle the ghosts of his past and prevent them from destroying his future with Kiera in the latest exciting installment in this national bestselling series.
July 1831. It's been fifteen years since Sebastian Gage has set foot in Langstone Manor. Though he has shared little with his wife, Lady Kiera Darby, about his past, she knows that he planned never to return to the place of so many unhappy childhood memories. But when an urgent letter from his grandfather reaches them in Dublin, Ireland, and begs Gage to visit, Kiera convinces him to go.
All is not well at Langstone Manor. Gage's grandfather, the Viscount Tavistock, is gravely ill, and Gage's cousin Alfred has suddenly vanished. He wandered out into the moors and never returned. The Viscount is convinced someone or something other than the natural hazards of the moors is to blame for Alfred's disappearance. And when Alfred's brother Rory goes missing, Kiera and Gage must concede he may be right. Now, they must face the ghosts of Gage's past, discover the truth behind the local superstitions, and see beyond the tricks being played by their very own eyes to expose what has happened to Gage's family before the moors claim yet another victim...
I'll put it out there: the recent books don't have the edginess that the first few books had, and this one had Gage's tragic past laid somewhat thickly on the ground, but I still thoroughly enjoy them. I can imagine once you marry off your protagonist it becomes difficult to defy conventions quite so easily; some tropes become unavoidable.
Still, the characters continue to please, and Huber did fitting justice to the Dartmoor moors; Gage's tragi-angst wasn't the only thing thick on the ground: thick fog, heavy mist, unrelenting rain, a formidable dark, gloomy manor, and a hint of the supernatural - the moors wouldn't be the moors without them and they were all here in spades.
The mystery was pretty darn good too. Was a crime committed? Is the heir playing his usual games? Why is everybody hiding everything? In the end, crimes were definitely committed and while the murderer came out of nowhere for me, in spite of the name occurring to me in relation to a tangential plot element, I don't feel like it was a cheat on the part of the author. I can't say she necessarily played fair in the strictest sense of the word, but I don't feel like she pulled any rabbits out her hat either.
I'm a fan, and I'll eagerly buy her next one.
This book will work for the Kill Your Darlings cards for Victim: Easy Rawlings and Victim: Ariadne Oliver. Not sure which I'll use it for yet though.
Reading updates
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Started reading
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13 March, 2018:
Finished reading
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13 March, 2018:
Reviewed