Silence for the Dead

It's hard to imagine a narrator better suited to voicing the determined and resourceful Kitty Weekes than Mary Jane Wells. It's 1919, and Kitty, desperate to escape abuse and poverty, poses as a nurse at isolated Portis House, a home for shell-shocked veterans. With its disturbed inhabitants, Portis House--understaffed, decaying, and having only candlelight at night--provides the perfect setting for an old-fashioned ghost story. Wells captures Kitty's ally, war hero Jack Yates, and the voices of the other men, with assurance. The story has just enough shivers for enjoyment as well as a little romance and fascinating insights into societal attitudes toward PTSD before it was recognized. C.A.T. © AudioFile 2014, Portland, Maine

February 24, 2014
In St. James’s atmospheric third ghostly mystery set in post-WWI England (after 2013’s An Inquiry into Love and Death), Kitty Weekes is fleeing her abusive father when she learns of a nursing vacancy at Portis House, a grand estate now housing shell-shocked veterans. Hoping the remote location will protect her, she wins the job using falsified credentials. Kitty learns that the eerie house’s original owners have mysteriously disappeared and that the patients suffer the same terrifying nightmare as well as a propensity for similar suicides. As fear drives her search for explanations, Kitty bonds with a man known only as Patient Sixteen. He proves an able—and attractive—fellow investigator before a deadly influenza epidemic isolates Portis House, leaving it prey to a past that will not rest. St. James cleverly intertwines the story’s paranormal elements with what is now called PTSD, crafting a pleasurably creepy tale about the haunting power of the unseen. Agent: Pamela Hopkins, Hopkins Literary Associates.