Rather than a gripping page-turner, this is a well-crafted tale to be sunk into, like a feather bed or one’s favorite chair, with the phone turned off and a steaming cup of coffee (or tea, if you must) to go with it. We meet the various members of the family that once summered in the once-lovely, now neglected Cornwall estate, and we watch across the years over three generations of the Edevane family that lived there, both in the years before World War II up to the present, with its elderly descendants that remain living. Morton takes us deftly from one setting, both time and place, to another so seamlessly that we cannot help being spellbound this is literary fiction at its best. Sadie sublimates her urge to follow up on her current, forbidden case by poking into the old mystery in Cornwall. Sparrow has been told to take some time off and stay away from the case she retreats to her grandfather’s home in Cornwall, and becomes transfixed by an older, colder case, that of the mysterious disappearance of a child that lived in the beautiful old home nearby, Loeanneth, where a baby boy vanished many years earlier. A toddler was found abandoned in her home, and Sparrow is haunted by the insistence of the child’s grandmother that her daughter would never, ever leave the child intentionally. Sadie Sparrow works for the Metropolitan Police, but her job hangs by a thread because she has become over-involved in the case of a missing woman. The book is a must-read for all that love mysteries and literary fiction.
Thank you once, twice, and a third time too, because Morton has done it again. This deep, luminous story came to me from Net Galley and Atria Books, a division of Simon and Schuster.
And once more, experience proves that a brilliant writer can sell any story, in the setting of her choice, with the protagonists of her choice, and she can make it flow smooth as warm butter.
But The Lake House is written by the author that produced The Forgotten Garden, and so when I had the chance to grab the galley, I went for it. As a rule, I am not fond of British fiction I prefer working class protagonists to the silver-spoon variety and I like urban settings more than pastoral ones.
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