The Family Plot, by Cherie Priest

[mrissa]

Review copy provided by Tor Books.

I don’t think a single one of Cherie Priest’s books is My Sort Of Thing, and yet I’ve read almost all of them. Cherie knows paragraph-level pacing like nobody’s business, the sort of thing that makes it easy to read just a little more and just a little more until another hour has gone past and you haven’t started making supper yet.

This one is a haunted house story. In some ways it’s a very classic haunted house story, and in others it’s very modern. Everyone uses their cell phones sensibly, and most of the characters are engaged in a very modern business: salvaging wood, fixtures, and other parts from old houses before they get torn down, to sell them for elevated antique prices. Dahlia Dutton is a recent divorcee, still working through her issues with losing both husband and house in the divorce. She’s working with her cousins and another employee on a job that could make or break the family business. And that job turns out–of course–to be haunted.

Cherie Priest clearly knows a lot about old houses and their bits, and there’s an affection for them that shines on almost every page. She doesn’t shy away from admitting the places where they can be unpleasant, even downright nasty, but the feeling that they’re worth attention comes out and makes the house feel more special than the genre-standard haunted house.

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Originally published at Novel Gazing Redux