The Lake House
By Kate Morton
Published by Atria Books and distributed by Simon and
Schuster, October 20, 2015
Purchased and read on Amazon Kindle
Rating: Four
Stars (out of five)
So I love Kate Morton’s work. Every time I hear she’s going to release a
new book, I get excited. I’m always torn
over whether to get the book as soon as it comes out and read it in bits and
pieces as I have time or to wait until I have a free weekend and can seclude
myself with the book and some snacks.
This time, I chose option A, not having a free weekend in the immediate
future. I think I’m glad I did.
Like all Morton books, The
Lake House has two intertwined narratives, one from the present and one
from the past. In this book, the
present-day (well, 2003) story concerns Sadie Sparrow, a London police
detective who, after a case goes badly wrong, goes to Cornwall to stay with her
grandfather. While there, she stumbles
across an old, abandoned estate and discovers that the family who lived there
left the property after their baby son was kidnapped and never found. As you can probably guess, the past (1933)
story concerns what really happened the night Theo Edevane was kidnapped. Theo’s older sister, Alice, who is a
successful detective novelist, also plays a significant role in both stories.
I think I’ve mentioned that books like this, which move back
and forth between the present and the past, are some of my favorites to read. Usually in books like this I prefer one story
or the other, and with Morton, that’s usually the past story. This time, I found both narratives equally
convincing and enjoyable, and I particularly liked seeing how Alice developed
from the young girl in 1933 to the acerbic novelist in 2003. As I progressed from the beginning to the
middle of this book, past red herrings and false leads and alongside likable,
human characters, I thought, “This is great!
I’ll finally be able to give a book five stars on the blog!”
Alas, it was not to be, and the ending is the reason
why. I had it figured out long before I
finished the book, and when I first thought of it I dismissed it: “No, she wouldn’t be that obvious, or that
trite.” Well, she was, and I was quite
disappointed. So disappointed, in fact,
that I almost knocked the book down to three stars, or maybe three and a half
(now that Miss Fisher has induced the half star ratings). Then I remembered how much I enjoyed reading
most of the book, and decided four was the way to go. And now that I think about it, I was
disappointed with the end of The Secret
Keeper, too, after staying up way too late to finish it one night several
years ago. The Forgotten Garden thus remains, for now, my favorite Morton.
As you can see from the sidebar, I’m doing NaNoWriMo this
year, and since I’m writing historical fiction I’m doing quite a bit of
research reading, so this may be the last book review I post for a bit. We shall see.
