I don’t know about you, but there’s nothing I enjoy more than relaxing poolside during the summer with a great book. My ideal summertime read isn’t light, fluffy or funny. Give me a mystery with a crumbling mansion, broken dreams, vengeful ghosts, suspicious deaths and a protagonist driven to madness, please. Carol Goodman’s most recent work of Gothic fiction, The Widow’s House, is deliciously twisted and dark, an ideal atmospheric mystery for fans of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca. Goodman’s writing is always wonderfully creepy and intense (see: The Lake of Dead Languages) and The Widow’s House is no exception. It’s a chillingly satisfying read, sure to help you cool off in the summer heat.
Writers Jess and Clare Martin move from Brooklyn to a crumbling estate called Riven House in the Hudson River Valley in an attempt to rejuvenate their writing and their failing marriage. Clare soon starts to unravel as she encounters forces that cause her to question her marriage, her writing and her identity.