DEADLY CHOICE

Kate Kinsella’s brief career as a detective (Deadly Echo, 2003, etc.) takes a supernatural turn when a childhood friend invites her to chase ghosts in Cornwall.

It seems odd that Helen Woods should fasten on Kate, who barely noticed her at school, but the depth of Helen’s fear at being left alone at Tamberlake while her fiancé Paul Warrinder is off in South America—along with the beastly heat back in Longborough—persuades Kate to take her terrier Jasper and head for the coast, leaving her best friend and landlord, Hubert Humberstone, to hold the fort back home. Kate and Helen are soon joined by Helen’s best friend Gill, who is even more suspicious than Kate about the death of Fran, Paul’s first wife, who supposedly threw her two toddlers off a nearby cliff before plunging to her own rocky death. The mysterious sounds of weeping that kept Helen from sleeping now bedevil Kate. Chatting up the locals, she discovers yet an earlier wife, Alison, who disappeared without a trace shortly before Paul married Fran. She also discovers some of Fran’s watercolors signed by Paul, and a huge bank loan in Paul’s name. Though the wedding preparations move ahead, Helen becomes increasingly nervous, and things continue to go bump in the night.

Green’s inability to decide whether her puppets are spooky or just plain nasty leaves the reader high and dry.