The Lake House by Kate Morton

I haven’t enjoyed a novel like Kate Morton’s The Lake House in a long time. What a revelation!

A dual time narrative, the novel tells the parallel story of Alice Edavane whose baby brother Theo went missing from the family’s Cornish estate in the summer of 1933; and that of Sadie Sparrow, a Met detective from London on a compulsory “vacation,” who stumbles across the cold case in the year 2003.

Sadie, pursued by personal demons and a case of her own that went wrong, seeks refuge in an idyllic seaside village in Cornwall where her grandfather recently retired.

One morning on her daily jog, she discovers an abandoned house. The once-grand and now slowly decaying structure has an air of mystery as everything inside it seems to have been frozen in time, down to the family’s photographs on the mantelpiece. It’s as if the residents had departed in a hurry and never came back.

With time on her hands and a nagging detective’s hunch in the back of her head, Sadie sets out to unravel the 70 year-old-mystery in which nothing is what it appears. There is an illicit love affair, a lost friendship, and war-related post traumatic stress disorder that echoes down through the decades.

Twists and turns abound, until the trail of breadcrumbs leads Sadie–and the nearly 90-year-old Alice who is still guilt-ridden by the events of that long-ago midsummer night – to a place, and a person, they least expected to find.

The Lake House is an engrossing, fast-paced mystery. I will be reaching for Kate Morton’s other books just as soon as my local library reopens.

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If you like historical mysteries, you may enjoy Silent Water, a Jagiellon Mystery Book 1, set at the 16th century royal court in Cracow. It’s available in ebook and paperback on Amazon and FREE to read on Kindle Unlimited.