#BookReview The Stranger by Kate Riordan @KateRiordanUK @MichaelJBooks

The Stranger by Kate Riordan
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Cornwall, 1940.

In the hushed hours of the night a woman is taken by the sea.

Was it a tragic accident? Or should the residents of Penhallow have been more careful about whom they invited in?

In the midst of war three women arrive seeking safety at Penhallow Hall.

Each is looking to escape her past.

But one of them is not there by choice.

As the threat of invasion mounts and the nightly blackouts feel longer and longer, tensions between the close-knit residents rise until dark secrets start to surface.

And no one can predict what their neighbour is capable of . . .

In a house full of strangers, who do you trust?

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The Stranger is the third book I have read by Kate Riordan and I love the chilling atmosphere of the book. The book starts off very mysterious with a suggestive chapter "The Night Diana Devlin goes Missing", and then the book jumps back in time taking us six weeks back in time and then we get to learn the main characters in the book, land girl Diane Devlin, both through her POV and her diary, her roommate and also land girl Rose and also the lady of the mansion Eleanor. All three women have secrets and Diane is the catalyst that will bring past events to the light.

The Stranger is a book that at first felt a bit difficult to place, it definitely felt more chilling than the previous two books I have read by the author, more thriller than a mystery. Also, I found the characters a bit hard to connect to, especially Diane was difficult to figure out because the version you get to know through the diary feels a lot different from the person the other characters meet. Let me just say that she provoked so many people that I was not surprised that the book started off with her going missing. It was first towards the end that I realized that her presence in Penhollow perhaps was not so bad, she did set things in motion. Things that had to be dealt with. However, what will the consequences be?

I will end this review by saying that the ending was not what I expected and I want to say bravo to the author! It was such a great ending, so perfect!

I want to thank Penguin UK for providing me with a free copy through NetGalley for an honest review!

The Shadow Hour by Kate Riordan

The Shadow Hour by Kate Riordan
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The year is 1922 and Grace has been hired to be a little boy's governess in the crumbling Fenix House. She is following in her grandmother's footsteps who was governess there years ago. Grace has heard stories since she was little about the house, but she realized when she arrives at Fenix House that her grandmother's stories perhaps not are all true. Why did her grandmother that she should work at the house and what really happened all the years ago when her grandmother worked a summer at Fenix House?

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I read The Girl in the Photograph by Kate Riordan last year and liked the book and I knew that I wanted to read this one when I saw that this one also had to a story about two women in different eras, one in 1878 and one in 1922. In 1878, we meet Harriet who has lost her father and has to work as a governess since she because her father's business crashed. Around 40 years later her granddaughter Grace also takes the job as a governess. Both women have what her grandmother calls “glimmers”; vague visions of the future. Grace realized quite soon that everything her grandmother told her is not entirely true. For instance, the room she gets is not the one that her grandmother described for her, but it's the room that every governess has slept in. And, that is just a little thing, the more she learns the more she realizes that her grandmother has told her quite a lot of embellished stories while the truth seems to be that the summer all those years ago is a much darker story.

There was a moment around 60-70% into the book when I felt a bit frustrated with the fact that there were 200 pages left of the book. I did enjoy the story, but I felt that a 500+ pages book need to have a story that keeps the interest up all the time and right at that moment I felt that too much of the time was spent on less interesting events and I wanted to know what really happened in 1878. Fortunately, the story picked up the pace and I was rewarded with a really good ending.

I enjoyed most of the book, I did, however, feel that the "romance" in 1878 was a bit predictable. But Harriet's past with the wife in the house made the story really good. The book was a bit darker that I expected. I thought it would just be a granddaughter discovering that her grandmother had a different past than she had been told since she was little. Which, in a way is true, but still the story turned out different from what had I expected, which I liked.

I liked both storylines. Sometimes a storyline is weaker than the other, but in this book both are interesting to read. I also think that this book is better than The Girl in the Photograph. The story is more interesting and I loved they way Riordan decided to end the book.

I want to thank the publisher for providing me with a free copy through Netgalley for an honest review!