Isolation, ill will in country manor

FICTION

The isolated, decrepit country house with the sinister history has long been a staple of the thriller -- and what's wrong with that? -- but the frights need not be the sole focus.

It's a premise that British author Serena Mackesy proves with aplomb in "Hold My Hand," a page turner to take up -- and not put down -- while the winds of winter howl.

Bridget Barton was a successful London florist when she met Kieran Fletcher. She could not have foreseen her future in less than a decade: Having shed the abusive Kieran, she and their 6-year-old daughter, Yasmin, have been reduced to near poverty. They're living hand to mouth, and Bridget is convinced that Kieran's continuing threats mean she must disappear with Yasmin.

Vanish she does, to distant Cornwall, where she takes a job as housekeeper at Rospetroc House, an old family home that has seen a surfeit of sorrow and is now used as a guest lodge.

Among those griefs was the plight of 9-year-old Lily Rickett, one of the many children who was evacuated to England's rural areas from its cities during World War II. At Rospetroc, Lily found not haven but hell, in the form of Felicity Blakemore, the house's mistress, and her bullying son, Hugh.

With skillful pacing, Mackesy blends the two stories into a seamless whole whose heart is not confined to simple thrills -- though they're here in abundance -- but also lies in the serious attention she gives to spousal and child abuse.

"Hold My Hand" pays tribute to the traditional aspects of the country-house thriller: villagers with strange tales to tell, isolation aplenty, a faulty electrical system, a plucky heroine and a villain whose everyday persona makes him even more threatening. But where Mackesy excels is in atmospheric detail -- "the tiny, stone-framed window that looks out over a waterlogged lawn" and "things that are sharp and things that are heavy and things that are coated with the dust of decades."

There's murder here, and revenge. But as you keep those pages flying, Mackesy's depiction of the mistreated -- then and now -- will keep you as involved as her ingenuity in dispensing menace.
Contact Jay Strafford at (804) 649-6698 or .