Book Review: The Evening Spider by Emily Arsenault

The Evening Spider

By Emily Arsenault

Published by William Morrow and Sold by HarperCollins, January 2016

Purchased and read on Amazon Kindle

Links: Amazon, B&N, Powell's

Rating: Four Stars (out of five)

I enjoyed Arsenault’s latest more than any of her other books.  I haven’t read her first novel, The Broken Teaglass, but I have read the other three (What Strange Creatures, In Search of the Rose Notes, and Miss Me When I’m Gone).  Obviously, I liked each of the above three enough to read the next, but I can’t say I’ve found her books to be must-reads.  In fact, I probably wouldn’t have read Rose Notes or Miss Me had they not been marked way down, and wouldn’t have bought The Evening Spider when I did had it not been on sale for 99 cents.  On the whole, I’d describe Arsenault’s writing as Domestic Suspense.  Her young(ish), female, main characters are usually solving some mystery that directly effects them and their daily lives.  This is fine, but both Rose Notes and Miss Me suffered from flat plots that (too me) petered out, and the resolution to What Strange Creatures was melodramatic enough that it bothered me (also, I guessed the culprit very early on, which always cuts into my enjoyment of a mystery).  But, like I said above, I really enjoyed The Evening Spider.

The story alternates between the present and 1885.  In the present-day story, young mother Abby suspects that her house is haunted and that the ghost is trying to harm her young daughter.  In 1885, Frances, also a relatively new mother, becomes obsessed with a murder that took place near her Connecticut home.  Both stories are told in the first person; Abby’s is a standard first-person narrative, but Frances’s unfolds as she tells her twin brother the story of how she ended up in a mental hospital.  The latter narrative strategy is highly effective.  I really wanted to know what happened to Frances.  So does Abby, who finds Frances’s journal and becomes convinced that her fate is somehow tied to the earlier woman’s.

The story is told in short chapters alternating between Abby’s perspective and Frances’s narrative with, for a while, sections of Frances’s journal.  Short chapters keep it moving and kept me reading, sometimes to the detriment of my sleep schedule.  Since Abby’s story is all about finding out what happens to Frances, we accompany her on her journey—but we know more than she does, which is sometimes frustrating (in a good way—we’re frustrated for Abby, not with Arsenault).  The stakes for Frances are much higher than those for Abby.  While Abby is unsettled by what’s going on in her house, she’s not actually in personal danger from it, and most of the danger Frances is in comes from her historical circumstances.  That is, Frances can end up in a mental hospital because her husband finds her inconvenient, and we know very well that nothing like that is going to happen to Abby.

My one problem with this book is that it doesn’t always seem to recognize that the stakes for Abby just aren’t as high as the stakes for Frances.  Maybe my problem with that is that I have a hard time buying that supernatural forces are an actual danger to anyone, even in fiction, but it does mean that the conclusion of the present-day story is a little underwhelming.  There’s simply nothing to really resolve, while the nineteenth-century story has a satisfying and logical conclusion.  Overall, I enjoyed the book a lot and would recommend it for fans of historical fiction and mysteries.