The Evening Spider

Arsenault's story of two young mothers living in the same house centuries apart is both eerie and mesmerizing. The events of the two time periods are both told from a first-person point of view, with a different narrator for each. Bernadette Dunn deftly conveys the loose grip that Frances, who lived in the late nineteenth century, seems to have on her sanity; Dunn knows just when to infuse her narration with a tinge of madness. The modern-day protagonist, Abby, is voiced by Nan McNamara, who does a wonderful job keeping Abby relatable as she grows convinced that something supernatural is happening in her house. Both narrators bring considerable talent to Arsenault's well-plotted book, making for a wonderful but intensely creepy listening experience. J.L.K. © AudioFile 2016, Portland, Maine

Starred review from November 23, 2015
Arsenault (The Broken Teaglass) deftly shifts among three perspectives in this exquisitely creepy blend of historical true crime and modern ghost story: the conversational confession of Frances Barnett, a young mother, to her brother from a lunatic asylum in Northampton, Mass., in 1885; Frances’s diary, full of obsession with the bloody details of a popular murder case and increasing mental instability as she tries to care for a baby alone and without support; and the increasingly fearful viewpoint of Abby Olson Bernacki, who’s living in the Barnett house in Haverton, Conn., in 2014 and fighting the demons of her own past while seeking the missing pieces in the story that Frances’s diary tells, in the hope of understanding the bruises on her baby, Lucy, and the eerie hushing sound in the nursery upstairs. Arsenualt’s gift for letting readers feel the characters’ anguish from the inside while showing their irrational strangeness from the outside makes for terror that sticks. Agent: Laura Langlie, Laura Langlie Agency.

December 1, 2015
From the opening pages, it's clear that this will be a haunting novel. A newspaper account of an 1878 murder is followed by a horrible discovery by Abby Bernacki in her college dorm room in 1998. The mystery grows when Abbynow the mother of five-month-old Lucyis awakened by strange sounds coming from the baby's room. This leads Abby to research the nineteenth-century Barnett family house that she and her husband, Chad, recently bought. A journal kept by Frances Flinch Barnett reveals disquieting information about her daughter's birth in 1885 and her subsequent confinement in a mental institution for what became known to her descendants as unspeakable acts. Arsenault adroitly moves the narrative between accounts of Frances' visits with her twin brother in 188586, Abby's college days, Frances' journal entries, press accounts of two nineteenth-century murder trials, and Abby's concern for her daughter's safety and her growing fear of staying alone with Lucy in the house when Chad is away on business. An engrossing, suspenseful mix of historical fiction and contemporary thriller, with some unexpected twists and wisdom: We have to learn to live with our ghosts. (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)