Bettie's Books

bookshelves: summer-2014, e-book, net-galley, bettie-s-law-of-excitement-lost, betrayal, mental-health, families, published-2014

Description: Eleanor Lee is fiercely independent. She has lived alone well into her nineties, despite her now near-total blindness. Now, finally, she has been persuaded by her children to move into a home.

She employs Peter, a recent graduate nursing a broken heart, to spend the summer sorting through her attic - papers, photographs, books and letters - ahead of the move.

These fragments of her own history unleash in Eleanor a long-concealed story of forbidden love, betrayal, passion, grief and self-sacrifice; and in their unlikely friendship, something is unlocked in Peter's heart, too.

Fell in love with this from the very start and knew unless something drastic happened to radically alter the feeling, this would be a five star encounter. I was getting the same the same buzz that I had when reading The Thirteenth Tale.

The Twilight Hour is not a mystery. This standalone from one half of the successful Nicci French authorship has given a throughly intriguing story here, a life-sized slice of skeletons in the family cupboard, so the fizzled-out ending was really hard to take. There were no ends left untied, no threads hanging but no big finale either, and this screamed for a grandiose gesture.

Three and a half memory-burning bonfires.