The House of Whispers

April 27, 2020
Purcell (The Poison Thread) tantalizes with a skillful juxtaposition of nascent science and entrenched folk belief in this brooding period gothic. In the early 19th century, a maid going by the alias Hester Why has fled her employ in London under an unexplained dark cloud to serve as nursemaid to elderly spinster Louise Pinecroft, owner of Morvoren House on the remote Cornish coast. Hester soon discovers that the members of Louise’s household believe fairy changelings have a foothold among Morvoren’s personnel. That superstition, as it develops, channels directly back to Louise’s work with her physician father 40 years earlier, and his efforts to cure tubercular patients with primitive medicine in the region’s fairy-haunted caves. Its grave impact on Dr. Pinecroft’s confidence as a man of reason and the doubts it raises in him about his efficacy as a physician set the stage for the dramas that have festered into the novel’s present, and mirror the dangerous conditions Hester fled in London. Purcell paints a colorful portrait of her tale’s distant time and place and immerses the reader in an era when superstition was a tenacious thread in the social fabric that bound its people. Her tale of secret guilt and atoning for it through ancient customs will please fans of classic gothic melodrama.

May 15, 2020
In Purcell's third creepily atmospheric historical novel, a young woman flees London under a dark cloud only to discover new threats in superstition-haunted early Victorian Cornwall. After serving as Lady Rose Windrop's maid in elegant Hanover Square, Esther Stevens, having assumed the name of Hester Why, is unprepared for the stark contrast of her new position as a nurse and personal maid to the silent and partially paralyzed Louise Pinecroft, mistress of the cliffside Morvoren House. In the remote, eerie mansion she finds a strange household enacting bizarre local customs. Salt lines the doorway of Rosewyn Pinecroft's bedroom. Wearing her dress inside out, Rosewyn, Louise's childlike adult ward, gives the startled Hester a ball of bible pages "for protection."Creeda, Rosewyn's caretaker and the longest serving member of the staff, warns Hester against being "pixy-led." Alternating with Hester's increasingly unreliable first-person narrative (aided by gin and stolen laudanum) are two other storylines. One reveals Hester's hidden guilt at the events that drove her from London. The other goes back 40 years to when a young Louise assists her grief-stricken physician father as he embarks on a radical experiment using prisoners to find a cure for the tuberculosis that killed the rest of their family. Purcell excels at creating a spooky Gothic ambience, and the wild Cornish coast with its ancient folklore makes a wonderfully evocative backdrop. She also does a good job at establishing psychological ambiguity in her characters so they (and readers) aren't sure if what they see is real or if they are going mad. A dark and unsettling novel for lovers of Rebecca and Jane Eyre.

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June 1, 2020
Esther Stevens is on the run, so she assumes the name Hester Why and takes a job as a nurse at a secluded estate. Her charge, Louise Pinecroft, suffered a stroke and spends her days paralyzed, staring at her collection of bone china. Hester's fellow servants warn her about fairies and strange lights, but she dismisses this talk as superstitious and commits to helping Miss Pinecroft. Interfering with this desire is her even stronger desire for gin. Without access to it, Hester starts to siphon off her mistress's laudanum. As Hester's point of view becomes increasingly dream-like and unreliable, the narrative shifts to 40 years before, when Louise's physician father was testing a radical new treatment for tuberculous, the disease that took the rest of his family. As Louise and Hester battle their figurative demons and what might be literal fairies, Purcell amps up the tension and smartly leaves it up to readers to decide what is real or imagined. This book will appeal to those who like their historical fiction clever, creepy, and gothic.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)