Review: good
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 03 5, 2014
Laura Jane Leigh is a good writer.  She had me interested the entire way through the book until the end.  It's the plot that left something to be desired.  I would recommend that she go on an Alfred Hitchcock watching marathon before she writes her next book so that she can see what I mean, without me giving away the end of the novel.The plot of the book goes like this; wife falls in love with classic centuries-old mansion and she and her lawyer husband buy it.  Wife succumbs to strange illness and has dream-like visions of a crime that happened in the house nearly a hundred years ago. Husband fears for wife's mental health, but wife doesn't want the visions to stop until she knows what happened in the house.Other than the ending, I was hooked from the first page of Shadow of the Rose.  Her writing flowed as naturally as any suspense novel, and I loved her female characters.  The male characters were a little flat and uninteresting, and never picked up steam.  I just couldn't get a handle of Marion's husband James.The way the author wove two stories together kept my interest.  It was easy to keep the two times separate so that the two threads of the story circled around each other without becoming tangled.  The author never really told us whether it was reincarnation, or ghosts that caused Marion to have her 'visions' of the past, and in the end, it still wasn't clear.I was reminded of a movie starring Emma Thompson, which I can't remember the name of, that had two people playing out a second set of lives with each other.  The ending was totally surprising, something this story was not.If this is a first novel, then Leigh has a great start in her writing career.  Her writing was intriguing, and professional, and can stand up to any bestseller.  This book almost had it all, and it's still a good 'beach read'.