Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #881120 in Books
• Published on: 2004-12-10
• Released on: 2004-11-18
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

Amazon.com
Karen Novak's remarkably polished first novel is a story of two women separated by a century and linked by the suspicion of madness and the lingering traces of guilt. In 1889, Eleanor Bly murdered her six children and flung herself from the tower of Five Mile House. More than a hundred years later, her ghost, who narrates much of the novel, reaches out to Leslie Stone, a New York cop who has killed a child murderer and is haunted by her action. The house is their common ground. When Leslie's husband comes to Wellington to restore the house for a deep-pocketed local historical organization bent on marketing the town's local witch lore to the vacationing masses, Eleanor finds an audience and Leslie finds... what? "Her fascination with the house was indeed connected to something else, and if she stared at Five Mile House long enough the image before her would rearrange itself into the form of what she really sought."

Eleanor and Leslie (whose physical resemblance to the 19th-century Medea is uncanny) are, of course, on mirroring quests for redemption, a prize which, the madwoman's ghost realizes, carries a heavy price: "I do not crave the truth; I dread it.... Yet, without the opportunity to tell my story, all that is left me is the ephemeral, disjointed speculations of others. It is for this reason I protect Five Mile House, to hold my story safe. I protect it from the living who climb the hill to see the relic of a mad woman and pay no heed to the implications of madness in the house itself."

The trope of the madwoman in the attic has a long and distinguished literary history (think Jane Eyre), and contains a complex tangle of repressed sexual power, threatening desire, and narrative control. Novak uses the metaphor as a springboard into an exploration of history and memory--and into a rollickingly good story, complete with a search for an ancient godhead text, battling covens, and herb-induced suicide. Skillfully interweaving its 19th- and 20th-century tales, accelerating toward a simultaneous revelation of treachery and murder, Novak's ghost story is astonishingly well-balanced, elegant, and spooky. The author's deft touch imbues the novel with a dark gothicism that never veers toward the eye-rolling, shoulder-shrugging absurd. Her first effort should win Novak a legion of fans. --Kelly Flynn

From Publishers Weekly
In this strong debut, Novak combines suspense with modern witchcraft. Police detective Leslie Stone, a child abuse specialist, shoots an assumed perpetrator; after recuperation in a mental hospital, she leaves the police force. Then her carpenter husband, Greg, accepts an important restoration job at historic Five Mile House in the seemingly idyllic village of Wellington, whose main employer, a concrete recycling plant, is run by Wiccans who are searching for an ancient magical text. So is Harry Wellington, the owner of Five Mile House. As a curious Leslie researches the history of Wellington, Five Mile House and the deaths of the last family who inhabited itAthe mother, Eleanor Bly, supposedly murdered seven of her children and committed suicideAshe realizes she looks exactly like Eleanor. Is it coincidence or the reason the Stones were lured to Wellington? Leslie begins an edgy affair with local lawyer Phillip Hogarth and is befriended by enigmatic herbalist Gwen Garrett. Meanwhile, the ghosts of Eleanor and Amy, whose murder ended Leslie's police career, hover. Eleanor's ghost narrates part of the story, with some disconcerting shifts in tense. By the conclusion, Novak has the reader on tenterhooks as Leslie finds herself in mortal danger. Although this is more a damsel-in-distress novel with a supernatural bent than a traditional mystery, Novak successfully weaves the components together and leaves an opening for a sequel. Agent, Elizabeth Sheinkman at Elaine Markson. (Oct.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
This haunted-house tale is told, in large part, by the ghost of a woman who murdered her children in 1889; it's listened to, in whispers and suggestions, by a contemporary cop, Leslie Stone, who killed another child-murderer and is haunted by her crime. Leslie and her family move to a small town in New England (usually a warning sign in suspense fiction) to begin again. As the husband works on restoring the "haunted house," Leslie is drawn to the Wiccan community of the town and into the madness that possessed its Medea. Tension escalates with Leslie's increasing preoccupation, the apparent suicide of a friend, and the disappearance of one of Leslie's children. The ghost tale weaves in and out of the novel, climaxing in a revelation of betrayal and murder that keeps one step ahead of what's happening to Leslie. A terrific ghost story and a fine first novel. Connie Fletcher
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

Impressive Novel
I couldn't put this one down....a wonderful plot with twists and turns...unique storyline, not your typical ghost story fare. Creeped me out to the point where I couldn't sleep the other night! The ending left you wondering....nothing final, just a sort of ending where they leave you to imagine what might have happened to the main character(s), but that's ok, because it was such an impressive debut novel.

A BEAUTIFULLY WRITTEN GHOST STORY AND IMPRESSIVE DEBUT NOVEL...
This is a well crafted and beautifully written debut novel that is impressive. A modern day ghost story with Gothic underpinnings, it is a page turner, full of suspense and mystery. It is an intelligent ghost story that is as ephemeral, as it is gripping.

The story revolves around a married female detective, Leslie Stone, who lives with her husband, Greg, and her two young daughters, Molly and Emma. One morning, Leslie goes to work on a particularly brutal child homicide. A perpetrator is in custody, and when Leslie goes to interview him, she snaps and metes out a form of vigilante justice that is final and irrevocable. Arrested, charged with murder, and tried, she is found not guilty by reason of temporary insanity. Confined for months to a mental hospital, she is finally released.

Her husband, a building contractor, having anticipated the notoriety attendant with is wife's release, gets a job that enables them to move to a new place and get a fresh start, or so he thinks. They move to the small New England town of Wellington, where he is able to obtain his dream job, the restoration of an unusual house named Five Mile House. The catch here is that Five Mile House has had its own share of notoriety. A century ago, a woman, Eleanor Bly, killed her children, then herself in that house. Moreover, it is located in a town riddled with witches, adherents to the ancient Wiccan religion.

Leslie, a detective down to her very soul, soon discovers that she is Eleanor Bly's doppelganger, and that the dream job her husband got was not by chance. Moreover, she senses that there is something about the house that is evil. The past soon begins to collide with the present, as Eleanor reaches out to Leslie to try and set the record straight about what really happened at Five Mile House all those years ago. What she reveals, bit by bit, will keep the reader turning the pages.

It is only at the end that the auther stumbles a bit, as she tries to bring closure to her story. It is still, however, a debut novel to remember.

Well worth it.
Excuse the bad pun, but spellbinding seems to be the appropriate word in this case. Karen Novak is a serious and traditional novelist in every sense of the word and achieves status as both a writer and a story teller, when all too often I find one or the other. She pits a protagonist, compelling in her humanity and faults, in this case a female detective wrought with adversity, against the clandestine forces of the arcane, a long rooted conspiratorial structure of small town politics, and her own demons in the middle of an occult war. And somehow she grounds all of this into a remarkably believable reality: ours. Sounds fairly typical but doesn't read that way, in fact Five Mile House reads marvelously. And that's the really impressive part, because Novak honestly does write beautifully, as the cover boasts. Characters that sparkle, environments so subliminally visualized that they become personally familiar. Even a seasoned reader will find themselves impressed with her skillfully crafted prose, and undaunting read but something to be appreciated nonetheless. Five Mile House also benefits from a razor sharp plot, the sort of flawlessly conceived and executed gameplan that begs the question of outline and revision, as you are kept guessing to the very end, and not disappointed thereafter. To be quite frank I found it humbling. Couldn't help but wonder if Mr. King himself had read this and found his inspiration for Rose Red, but quite honestly I preferred Karen's version.


I'd recommend you pick this up and tag it for an Autumn read, as the topic matter is perfectly themed for the pagan holidays.