The House of Ashes

Starred review from July 5, 2021
This gut-wrenching novel of psychological suspense with ghostly undertones from Edgar finalist Neville (Ratlines) opens early one morning with social worker Sara Keane scrubbing off the blood stains she often sees on the kitchen floor of the Ashes, the 120-year-old house her father-in-law bought for her and her angry architect husband, Damien, in Belfast, where the couple moved after “things went bad” in England. Damien, who’s not yet up, believes Sara is imagining the blood stains. Then Sara hears someone hammering on the front door. Outside is Mary Jackson, a disheveled old woman, who says the Ashes is her house and rants about missing children. Damien appears, recognizes Mary, and ushers her out of the house to take her back to the “care home.” Sara and Mary later develop a friendship tempered by shared emotional anguish. Alternating story lines show how Sara’s present-day woes intersect with Mary’s traumatic past and shed light on how women called Mummies and men called Daddies mistreated children in the house. This unforgettable tale of servitude and subservience, domestic abuse, and toxic masculinity builds to a resolution offering redemption and heartfelt solace. Neville has outdone himself. Agent: Nat Sobel, Sobel Weber Assoc.

July 1, 2021
A former social worker who's come to the Six Counties--don't ever call it Northern Ireland--finds that the house her husband has moved her into deserves the name The Ashes all too well. Sara Keane's horizons keep narrowing. Her husband, architect Damien Keane, is so jealously possessive that he's isolated her from her friends and carried her off from Bath to a solitary property outside Morganstown after she greeted an earlier round of his controlling temper by swallowing an overdose of pills. Whatever gratitude she might have felt toward Damien's father for setting them up in a mortgage-free property is dashed by an uninvited visit from Mary Jackson, who's wandered away from the Greenway Care and Convalescence Home to pound on Sara's door. Alternating chapters gradually unveil the truth about Mary's ties to The Ashes. More than 60 years ago, she was imprisoned in the house, along with Noreen Weaver and Joy Turkington, to serve the pleasure of Ivan Jackson and his two sons, George and Tam. Neville introduces orphaned Esther Mooney, another victim, into the backstory to show just how the Jacksons operate. It's clear from a wealth of evidence that the early history of The Ashes left virtually everyone involved in the horrors dead, with Mary the only survivor. What's not clear is exactly how the climactic bloodbath came to pass and whether Sara, who's suffering what feels like a lower-pressure version of the same treatment from her own man, can escape an equally grisly fate. The first of these mysteries is never all that mysterious; it's the second one that will keep you turning the pages.

COPYRIGHT(2021) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

September 1, 2021

Sara and Damien Keane have recently moved from England to the tip of Northern Ireland to remodel an old house. Damien is extremely controlling of Sara, who is recovering from a suicide attempt. When elderly Mary appears at their door, blood-soaked and babbling about it being her house and asking about the children, Sara returns her to the care home and determines to learn her story. Alternating between narration by Sara in the present and Mary 60 years previously, Neville ("DCI Serena Flanagan" series; Ratlines) portrays a house of horror. Ivan and his two sons had kept Mary and two other women locked in the basement to slave over and service the men. Sara learns of their horrific end in old newspaper articles describing murder and suicide; Mary was the only survivor, but no one believed her story. Sara--who faces her husband's obsessive control, clues to a crime that might have been hidden in their under-construction house, and the Northern Ireland conflict--barely manages to assert herself enough to break free and learn from Mary what really happened in this cursed house. VERDICT A considerable departure from the author's well-known police series, this psychological thriller is not for the fainthearted.--Roland Person, formerly at Southern Illinois Univ. Lib., Carbondale

Copyright 2021 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 15, 2021
Sara's husband, Damien, promises that a new beginning for their troubled relationship awaits in his Northern Ireland hometown, where his father has bought a home for them. Instead, the Ashes, named for its surrounding trees, holds unimaginably dark secrets. Days after they arrive, a bloodied elderly woman appears, desperately claiming that the Ashes is her home. Damien, infuriated, bundles the woman back to her nearby nursing home and demands Sara's silence about the disturbing event. On home turf, Damien ramps up his familiar efforts to control Sara through violence and isolation. But when she persuades an unwitting electrician to take her into town, she learns that their elderly visitor, Mary, is, in fact, the Ashes' previous owner. Risking Damien's wrath, Sara develops a clandestine friendship with Mary, who reveals her childhood imprisoned at the Ashes by a family of men who enslaved vulnerable girls, and the massacre that tied her to the Ashes forever. A haunted-house thriller with claws, built of strong heroines, familiar nightmares, and gut-twisting portrayals of coercive control and sadistic violence.

COPYRIGHT(2021) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.