Happy Friday, all– and happy October!

To kick off my Spooky Season reading, I finally read the latest Riley Sager, The Unknown, which is, hands down, my favorite of his books yet.  The premise: a newbie actress is cast for a role in a major film when the previous actress drops out.  The hitch?  The movie is about the disappearance of a group of women in the 1920s on a small island off the coast of Vermont.  The director has decreed to get into character the cast is to go to that island and dress and live as those characters for a week.  The island is supposedly haunted– or possibly cursed.  The women were spiritualists.  Legend has it in dabbling with the supernatural they unleashed something that consumed them one by one….  Wearing their clothes, living in their cabins, will history repeat itself?

What I love about Sager is his ability to take our own preconceptions, use them against us, and then twist the narrative in a way we never expected.  This book also raises questions about the sorts of stories we tell and the things we assume about women in the past… and as you all know that’s one of my hobbyhorses!  (And a key theme in my upcoming What Happens at Nightfall.)

After that, it was one of the Angela Thirkell Barsetshire novels I hadn’t read yet, The Old Bank House.  And it was a slog.  I adore early Thirkell.  Summer Half is one of my favorite books.   I can gleefully read August Folly or Wild Strawberries any number of times.  But once you get into her post-war work… I struggle.  This one was a particular struggle.  While it’s always nice to revisit old characters, about three-quarters of this book felt like a recap of previous books.  (I don’t need the characters, twelve years on, to spend ten pages reminiscing about the events of Summer Half; at that rate, I’d rather reread Summer Half.)  Picture that times dozens of characters from a dozen previous books.  So much time was spent on recapping old characters that at times it seemed there was no actual plot to this book.  The main characters would get a look in from time to time, but their romances and plot arcs felt distinctly secondary to the prolonged and scattered “Where Are They All Now?”  The sad thing is that there are some very good characters in this one and a great deal of Thirkell’s signature wit on display and if someone had only come in and pruned out most of Old Home Week, there might actually have been a book in there.  As it was, it took me most of the week to read, simply because I kept getting too bored to go on, but determined to finish it anyway.  Recommended only for Thirkell completists.

However, it was a great “what not to do” tutorial as I start work on the sequel to The Book I’m Not Allowed to Talk About Yet.

What have you been reading this week?

In other news, we’re only four days out from What Happens at Nightfall!

I’ll be hitting the road starting this Sunday.  You can find me Sunday at the Poisoned Pen in Arizona, Tuesday at the Corner Bookstore in New York, Thursday at the Ripped Bodice in Brooklyn with Sarah MacLean, and Friday in Lancaster, Pennsylvania with Lindsey Hameroff.

For more details and more events after that, check out my events page!