The sections with Sadie in 2003 are what give the mystery momentum. The mother she sees in Eleanor is strict and aloof, very different from the vulnerable girl the reader gets in Eleanor’s own passages. She paints Loeanneth as a magical world, secluded and beautiful. She’s an unreliable narrator purely because the details she remembers may or may not have relevance to the case. She’s a debutante with a dead father, a bunch of family debt, and a mom who wants to marry her off at sixteen to the highest bidder. She finds love outside her class, endures the fear and uncertainty surrounding WWI, and builds a life for her children while single-handedly holding the family together.Īlice’s sections in 1933 set the stage for the mystery–her perspective is that of a teenager caught up in her own drama. Eleanor’s section of the book comprises the family saga portion of this novel. It took awhile for this book to get going, partially because it’s so rich in detail. Loeanneth is a full on gothic mansion swallowed by the forest. In the Edevane’s world the lake house is really an estate (it has a name, Loeanneth), so it’s not as if Sadie stumbles on some decrepit Ted Kaczynski looking shack and immediately sees the appeal.

Now, in my world a lake house usually means a cabin with or without indoor plumbing. Unluckily, she has no desire to see the case reopened.

Luckily for Sadie, Alice (now an octogenarian mystery author) is still alive and living in London. She’s intrigued and learns about how Theo’s disappearance went cold, and she becomes obsessed with solving the case. She’s on holiday in Cornwall, licking her wounds, when she stumbles upon the Edevane lake house in the woods–now a crumbling, decaying ruin. Sadie enters into the story in 2003 she’s on leave from her job after fouling up a child abandonment case. We learn about the Edevane family and how they survived financial decay and WWI from Eleanor as we watch her as a young woman in the early 20th century. We get each woman’s POV (third person) as the narrative jumps around in time–Alice offers the perspective of a sixteen-year-old as she attends the family party in 1933. The book centers around three women: Alice Edevane, Theo’s older sister Eleanor Edevane, Theo and Alice’s mother and Sadie Sparrow, a policewoman. The Edevanes were a prominent family in England, and they were hosting their annual Midsummer’s Night party at their summer home in Cornwall the night he vanished from his nursery. The mystery that binds this book together involves the disappearance of an eleven-month-old baby, Theo Edevane, in 1933. The Lake House by Kate Morton is part historical fiction, part gothic mystery and part family saga–which means it’s 100% Elyse-bait. Genre: Historical: European, Literary Fiction