I admit I picked this book up at the library thinking it looked like the Phyllis Whitney and Victoria Holt titles I read in high school summers. What a surprise! Belfer takes the old stereotypes and stands them on their heads in this contemporary tale.
Hannah Larson and her nine-year-old son Nicky travel to Ashton Hall to visit her elderly family friend, Christopher. Her husband, Kevin, is a lawyer in New York. Their marriage has struggled, somewhat due to Nicky's health problems. Nicky acts out, curses, and can be violent. At other times, he is the darling child of everyone's dreams. Elderly Christopher Eckersley soon finds that better treatments are in America rather than Cambridge and he leaves them in the capable hands of the hall's other staff and occupants.
Things take a mysterious turn when Nicky finds the bones of an Elizabethan woman in an unoccupied wing of the vast mansion. When Hannah uses her research skills to learn more about the former occupants of the hall, she goes into a rabbit hole that provides more questions than answers. Religious and political matters greatly influenced the times and the occupants of great houses across England including Ashton Hall.
Belfer is certainly masterful in the red herrings she provides and the details about neurodiverse children, differences between very British terms and American ones, and the conclusions her characters surmise about the past and the present for women. There's feminism, history, romance, and mystery all wrapped up in one book...a great summer read!
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