Eve Chase's The Wildling Sisters begins with an attention grabbing scene of four sisters dragging a body across the lawn of a country house. It's a swelteringly hot summer day in 1959 and one of the sisters, Margot, describes the scene. How heavy the body is, how it snags bits of daisies as they pull it through the garden. One sister loses her glasses. The birds are singing and there is this summertime sleepiness to the atmosphere. And how nausea rises in her stomach as the blood splatters on all of them marking not just the killer but the quartet of sisters. How can you possibly resist reading on to find out just what happened that summer so long ago.
Flash forward nearly half a decade into the future and Applecote Manor, a country house full of secrets from that terrible summer so long ago, sits empty waiting for a new family to move in. Jessie and her husband are looking for a place to start their lives together. It's her first marriage but Will is a widower with a teenage daughter. Jessie and Will and baby Romy are a compact unit but Bella is having trouble getting past the death of her mother and living in London with its crowds and distractions is proving a bad influence on Bella. Living in the country, renovating a house like Applecote where there is peace and quiet and a small community seems the perfect solution to Bella's problems and a way to come together as a new family.
This is not a haunted house story, per se. But something bad happened that fateful summer and a darkness hangs over the house. Flora, Pam, Margot and little Dot are city girls but their single mother unloads them on their aunt and uncle one summer as she goes abroad to work. Applecote is already hiding secrets. Their cousin Audrey disappeared one summer several years prior. Not a sign of where she might have gone off to, perhaps she is still alive somewhere. Or perhaps her body is so well hidden it will never be found. Their aunt Sybil no longer leaves Applecote and there are rumors about their uncle Perry.
Audrey is a ghost whatever happened to her and she always hovers somewhere in the background. Margot, closest to her when she was an actual presence is taken with the story, the mystery, of Audrey. With three sisters who are smarter or prettier or more outgoing Margot knows she is the plain one. Audrey always made her feel special and for that she has always had a special affinity towards her. Even after she is gone. Add two attractive young men into the mix and things become ever more complicated. Cousins Harry and Tom have also come to the village where they are staying one last summer before one if off to university and the other the army. Applecote may be a small manor house, but Cornton, where the boys are living is a proper great house shut down save for their brief stay.
All the ingredients are ripe for mishap and misunderstanding and intrigue. The village no longer talks about Audrey or that summer and those families. They are the secret that is not exactly a secret but just something that is best left buried in the past. But Jessie senses something not quite right. When they took over Applecote the former owner had left quickly due to illness and the house was never cleared out. There are things to uncover and discover and Bella is curious. She is dealing with her own sadness with the death of her mother. Mandy is another ghost hovering, but this time hovering over Jessie and her desire to be a good mother and wife. She struggles not only with Bella's problems, with a husband away in London working more than he is at home, but also with the feeling that she will always be compared to Mandy and never quite able to match her.
I really enjoyed this story. I felt more akin to the story of the past initially but as the story progressed and things became more complex it flipped and I wondered how it would all tie together. There are definite overtones of Daphne du Maurier here and maybe even a little of Barbara Vine. When a novel with parallel plotlines works, and this one does quite nicely, it can make for a rich reading experience. I will definitely be reading more by Eve Chase.
This was my August prompt novel for the theme "a month in the country" and it made for a good country house novel, a great end of summer read and generally speaking a nice suspenseful story, which I always love. I am already thinking about my September book and will be sharing my book ideas soon.