The Ghost Orchid

You can count on certain things when it comes to novels by Carol Goodman. The protagonist will be a woman.  Quite often she is a writer or an artist.  The setting will be upstate New York.  There will be water involved and likely snow.  And along with the suspenseful theme there will be a romance involved as well.  This sounds pretty formulaic, and I guess Goodman's novels are somewhat formulaic, but I have read all (four) of them now.  Her latest is The Ghost Orchid, which I finished over the weekend.   I enjoyed it, but not as much as her earlier books (particularly The Lake of Dead Languages and The Seduction of Water).  The Ghost Orchid was really two stories, and each chapter goes back and forth in time between the two.  At first I found this distracting as just when I would get into one story, it would flip forward or backward in time.  Along with her usual suspense, this story involved the supernatural and a ghost story as well.  Actually there were many parallels between the stories, which were both set at Bosco--an artist's colony.  In 1893 Aurora and Milo Latham bring a medium to the estate to contact their three children who died of diptheria.  By the end of the story, Corinth Blackwell, the medium, and Tom Quinn her accomplice are gone and along with them their only surviving child.  Flash forward and enter Ellis Brooks who is writing a novel based on the events of that summer.  The further she gets into her novel the more she and the other Bosco residents believe something far more sinister happened at Bosco in 1893.  Well, you can imagine the rest.  While not quite as good as I had hoped, I still enjoyed it, and doubtless I will read Goodman's next novel as well.