Book of the Day

From the review

Rhys Bowen gives her heroine an odd kind of ventriloquism to perform, and The Castle in the Glen is at its best when it lingers on what that costs her. Emma Callander is a working writer in 1965 London, competent enough at her own books but broke enough to take the job of finishing someone else's: Iris Blackburn, a celebrated mystery novelist whose memory is failing, wants Emma to complete her final manuscript before it's too late. What starts as a professional puzzle, matching another woman's cadence and habits of mind, turns into something stranger once Emma travels north to research the book's setting and finds that Iris's supposedly invented murder happened, more or less exactly as written, on the Isle of Skye in 1904. Bowen doesn't rush the past into the present. The 1904 drowning and the disappearance of the young woman locals called the Wild Girl unspool in patient layers, filtered through gossip, old letters, and the closed ranks of an aristocratic family that has had sixty years to get its story straight. The castle itself does real work here: cold rooms, portraits nobody wants to talk about, a household staff that remembers more than the family does. I found myself more interested in the Wild Girl's absence than in any single clue about her, the way a name repeated by people who never knew her starts to stand in for a whole erased life.