The House at Midnight

Lucie Whitehouse knows her BRIDESHEAD REVISITED and has here reused some of its parts, yet created something with a memorable life of its own. Lucas Heathfield, a 20-something Oxford graduate, inherits a grand country house after his charismatic Uncle Patrick's bewildering suicide. He invites his tight circle of college pals to share the house with him. Soon they are all spending every weekend there, falling in and out of love with each other, while the house develops a disturbing hold on them, especially on Lucas and the manipulative charmer, Danny. Kate Reading's pacing is impeccable as she builds the characters' sense of dread and the listener's sense that some kind of complicated smash is coming, echoing past disaster. Reading excels in this gripping psychological puzzle. B.G. (c) AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine

February 25, 2008
At 30, Londoner Joanna still spends her free time with her Oxford college friends, now with burgeoning careers and all on the cusp of real adulthood. Lucas, Joanna's closest friend and prolonged crush, inherits Stoneborough Manor, a huge and imposing house in the Cotswold countryside filled with priceless art, where all the college friends are to spend every weekend together. The first visit, on New Year's Eve, doesn't start well, as the Londoners get lost. To Joanna, the manor has a threatening and unsettling aura, and indeed, the big, dark, vaguely confusing house with its secrets and disappointments works well as an allegory for moving into the responsibilities and fears of growing up. Joanna and her friends proceed to deal with the unknown, some well, others destructively. A focus on the shifting relationships and loyalties doesn't leave much room for plot, but Joanna's voice is engaging, and Londoner Whitehouse, making her debut, manages to generate a lot of interest in the somewhat flat Four Weddings and a Funeral
-esque ensemble: she gets the insecurities, pedigrees and Cotswold locale spot on. Unfortunately, this promising first effort features a truncated ending that is less evocative than jarring.