Mackesy, Serena: Hold My Hand

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There's something not quite right about Rospetroc, the old Blakemore place in Cornwall. Something to do with evacuees during the War--the locals aren't quite sure--and the crazy old lady who lived there with her son, whom no one quite trusted. The current generation of the family has never wanted to live in the place themselves, so they rent it out to honeymooners and the like who are looking for local color. But help is hard to find and harder to keep: inevitably the maids are scared off by the creepy things that go on in the house, or they just aren't able to handle the isolation of the place when there aren't any guests. But despite its drawbacks the job offers salvation for Bridget Sweeny and her six-year-old daughter Yasmin--from poverty and, more importantly, from Bridget's ex-husband, whose angelic looks belie his character. The restraining order she has against him is meaningless in the middle of the night when he's drunk and trying to kick the door down to get at them.

Mackesey's account of what happens at Rospetroc once Bridget and Yasmin move in is intertwined with the story of what happened there during the War, when the Blakemores were forced to take in children from the city, including the unlovely, nit-infested Lily Rickets. Both stories are brilliantly told. The characters are all well-developed. There's nothing to fault in the prose. The story is downright chilling. Hold My Hand is a nearly perfect piece of fiction. The only complaint I have is that the ending is anticlimactic. The suspenseful final confrontation for which the rest of the book has been preparing is finished with too quickly. (One can foresee on the whole how things are going to work out in the end, but I didn't mind that. The problem is that the ending is not as good as the one we've been led to expect.) Mackesey could have milked a lot more terror out of her final pages. Still, the book is highly recommended.