My rating: 3.5 of 5 stars
A house as old as Fiercombe Manor holds many secrets within its walls. But which dark chapter of its history is haunting Alice, a young woman staying there during the course of a fateful summer?
In 1933, naive twenty-two-year-old Alice is pregnant, unmarried, and disgraced. She can no longer share her parents' London home, so her desperate mother concocts a cover story and begs her old friend, Mrs. Jelphs, for help. The housekeeper at rural Fiercombe Manor, Mrs. Jelphs is moved by Alice's "plight" as a new widow and agrees to watch over her in the secluded English countryside until the baby is born and given up for adoption. Because the manor house's owners, Lord and Lady Stanton, no longer live there, Alice's only company will be Mrs. Jelphs and her skeleton staff.
Thirty years before Alice's arrival, Lady Elizabeth Stanton awaits the birth of her second child, fervently hoping he will be the boy her husband desires. But as her time nears, she is increasingly tormented by memories of what happened with her first baby and terrified that history will repeat itself . . . with devastating consequences.
At first, Fiercombe Manor offers Alice a welcome relief from her mother's disapproving gaze. But she begins to sense that all is not well in the picturesque Gloucestershire valley. After a chance encounter with Tom, the young scion of the Stanton family, Alice discovers that Fiercombe's beauty is haunted by the clan's tragic past. She is determined to exorcise the ghosts of the idyllic, isolated house.
Nothing can prepare Alice for what she uncovers. Can she escape the tragic fate of the other women who have lived in the Fiercombe valley?
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I requested The Girl in the Photograph from Netgalley and then I found an interesting book called Fiercombe Manor on Edelweiss and requested it. A while later when I had been granted access to them both did I realize that it was the same book. The Girl in the Photograph is the English book and Fiercombe Manor is the title for the book in US and Canada. I chose to read the Fiercombe Manor since the text was formatted better in that version.
This is the kind of book I like, a historical fiction/mystery. I love reading parallel stories, and in this book we get to follow both Alice and Elizabeth and as the story proceeds we get to know what happened to Elizabeth in the past at the same time as Alice in the present discover it. Now, the book wasn't that great that I had hoped it would be, but it was a good read and above all it was interesting even though I felt that story dragged on a bit in the middle, but I was probably just a bit impatient. I also liked the characters, I didn't even mind the budding romance between Alice and Tom Stanton.
So if you like historical fiction/mystery books then this is a book for you!
Thank you Netgalley/Edelweiss for providing me with a free copy for an honest review!
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