When the artist Marianne Glass falls to her death, everyone insists it was a tragic accident. Yet Rowan Winter, once her closest friend, suspects there is more to the story. Ever since she was young, Marianne had paralyzing vertigo. She would never have gone so close to the roof's edge.
Marianne -- and the whole Glass family -- once meant everything to Rowan. For a teenage girl, motherless with a much-absent father, this lively, intellectual household represented a world of glamour and opportunity. But since their estrangement, Rowan knows only what the papers reported about Marianne's life: her swift ascent in the London art world, her much-scrutinized romance with her gallerist. If she wants to discover the truth about her death, Rowan needs to know more. Was Marianne in distress? In danger? And so she begins to seek clues -- in Marianne's latest work, her closest relationships, and her new friendship with an iconoclastic fellow artist. But the deeper Rowan goes, the more sinister everything seems. And a secret in the past only she knows makes her worry about her own fate . .
Murders, manipulations, chaos in the family and art world. Nothing is, what it seems, and no one should be trusted, as they are.
A suspense story that turned out to be rather different than I expected, twists in the story, that were not possible to predict. A plot that is not possible to say much of, without giving it away. The writing of the story is beautiful, very English (naturally), and at times nearly poetic in nature. It flows nicely, sounds beautiful, but in a suspense story, can muddy the facts, the clues, and evidence, as the reader is building beautiful pictures in their mind. Yes, my mind was wondering quite a bit while reading this novel. There's a lot of characters. I wouldn't say they were difficult to keep track of, but at the beginning, as everyone is introduced, and the pieces of the puzzles are put into the table, it takes time with a big cast and crew, to get to the point of the matter, and built up the tension, the intensity, that I love, in a great suspense. The last fifth of the book blew me away. It left me pondering, and I am still not sure, what to think about it. But an excellent crescendo, with startling twists. As a huge romantic suspense fan, this wasn't quite my cup of tea, so to say, but that doesn't take anything away from the artfully crafted tale, that surely will make me wonder for a while. ~ Three Spoons
Lucie Whitehouse was born in the Cotswolds in 1975 and grew up in Warwickshire. She studied Classics at Oxford University and then began a career in publishing while spending evenings, weekends and holidays working on the book that would eventually become THE HOUSE AT MIDNIGHT.
Having married in 2011, she now divides her time between the UK and Brooklyn, where she lives with her husband. She writes full time and has contributed features to the Times, the Sunday Times, the Independent, Elle and Red Magazine. Amazon Goodreads Facebook Twitter
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