Girls of Brackenhill

In 2019, Hannah Maloney, the heroine of this riveting thriller from bestseller Moretti (The Vanishing Year), is living in Virginia with her fiancé, Huck, when she receives a phone call letting her know that her aunt Fae has been in a car accident. Though Hannah hasn't spoken to Fae in 17 years, she's listed as Fae's emergency contact. After Hannah and Huck arrive at Brackenhill, her aunt Fae and uncle Stuart's castle home in the Catskills, Hannah learns that Fae has died from her injuries, and Stuart is gravely ill with cancer. Hannah and her sister, Julia, used to spend summers at Brackenhill, until the summer 17 years earlier that Julia disappeared. When Hannah's dog uncovers a human bone on her aunt's property, the police, led by police officer Wyatt McCarran, who was Hannah's first boyfriend in their teens, investigate, though Hannah is sure the bone is her sister's. Meanwhile, Hannah has disturbing dreams and episodes of sleepwalking, and she's again attracted to Wyatt. Flashbacks to the summer Julia vanished heighten the suspense. Fans of gothic mysteries with a touch of the supernatural will be richly rewarded. Agent: Mark Gottlieb, Trident Media Group. (Sept.)

Seventeen years after her sister vanished from a family estate in the Catskills, Hannah Maloney is pulled back to the place by another calamity and then finds herself buried neck-deep in crimes past and present. While they were tweens and teens, Hannah and her older sister, Julia, spent five consecutive summers with their Aunt Fae and Uncle Stuart in Brackenhill, a neogothic castle high on a hill. They were the best times of Hannah's young life, partly because they got her away from Wes, the alcoholic, abusive man Trina Maloney married after her husband died. But they ended horribly with Julia's still-unexplained disappearance from the place. Now the plunging of Aunt Fae's car from the twisting access road into a ravine has brought Hannah back to Brackenhill along with her fiance, Huck. Upon arriving, they're greeted with the news of Fae's death. Stuart, long stricken with cancer, clearly hasn't long to live. Brackenhill seems to exert an unhealthy power over everyone who enters its orbit. Julia's best friend, Ellie, vanished the year before Julia did. During one of his rare lucid moments, Stuart mutters something about an accident involving someone named Ruby. Fae's best friend, Jinny Fekete, practices witchcraft and makes it clear that Fae did as well. And Detective Wyatt McCarran, whom both sisters were in love with during their enchanted summers, is becoming more and more convinced that Fae's accidental death was no accident. Link by link, Moretti hypnotically reveals "a tragic, violent daisy chain." Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.