Review: Excellent - almost perfect
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 02 11, 2014
This novel is told in two parts - a contemporary storyline, and one set in the Victorian era.The plot itself is excellent, and the two-part structure is crucial to the solution of the mystery regarding a certain house on the street.  I don't want to "spoiler" the book, so that is as much as I can say.There is one flaw with this book and I think it is a pretty major flaw.  The storyline set in the Victorian era feels exactly the same as the contemporary storyline.  On a few occasions I forgot that the story set in the past was supposed to be in the past.  I tried to work out why, and I came up with a couple of things.  First - nearly all of the descriptive passages occur in the first chapters, which are the contemporary storyline.  Then the story shifts - supposedly - to the past within the same house.  And there are virtually no descriptive passages at the start of the Victorian storyline because we are in the same house.  Except  - the house would NOT be the same.  The furniture would be different, rooms would be used for slightly different purposes, the decor would be different, the light fittings would be very different, there would be more servants in the Victorian house because there would be more actual housework (no electrical appliances, remember?),and so on.And then there are the characters.  Miranda Whitestone, supposedly a woman in 1892, thinks and behaves like a modern woman.  In fact most of the characters in the Victorian ear story do, including Miranda's husband.  Even the glamorous femme fatale, Lucinda Eden, feels too "modern".  Pretty much the only difference between Miranda's home and the "modern" version is that Miranda does not have air conditioning - which hardly makes it feel Victorian.This lack of any sense of difference between the two period makes it hard to track what is happening when, and the storylines sometimes blur into one another.  It does not help that in both time periods there is one man, a woman who wants that man, and the other woman she is afraid is taking him from her.  Every now and again I had to stop and organise things in my head to keep the two plotlines separate.  It is a shame because it detracts from one of the strongest points of the book overall - the way the author managed to echo and contrast events within the two stories against one another.  For this to work, the different time periods HAVE to "feel" different so one can keep track.  Instead, the two timelines blend into one another and the echo/contrast within the plots just ends up adding to the confusion.Nevertheless, the writing is excellent, both storylines are intriguing within their own right, and the endings ties them in with one another beautifully.  If the Victorian time period had been written with an eye to keeping the period details in mind, this would have been a great book - I would not have been surprised to see it up with the big sellers.  So close!But it is still a good book, and well worth the read.  I am going to keep an eye out for future books written by Stephanie Elmas.