Rebecca James (Beautiful Malice; Sweet Damage) delivers a hauntingly atmospheric tale in The Woman in the Mirror. Forbidding Winterbourne Hall, located at the very edge of Cornwall, has harbored dark secrets for more than two centuries. New Yorker Rachel Wright has never heard of it, and is astonished to learn that she is heir to the decrepit estate.
In 1947, Alice Miller accepted a post as governess to the de Grey family of Winterbourne. Her charges, twins Constance and Edmund, appear to be angelic, but they've had a hard life. Their mother died when they were toddlers, and their father, Captain Jonathan de Grey, was badly wounded in the war and has returned an aloof, stern figure, apparently still mourning the loss of his wife and the damage to his leg. However, Alice finds herself drawn to the enigmatic Captain de Grey, just as she becomes unnerved by the increasingly strange behavior of the twins.
In the present day, Rachel travels to Cornwall to seek out how she is connected to the de Grey family, and finds both a tentative new love and some disquieting revelations about the history of Winterbourne, which are closely entwined with her own past.
Perfectly gothic, The Woman in the Mirror is a creepily enthralling tale. Readers are sure to love the disturbing world of Winterbourne and be shocked to discover exactly how Alice and Rachel's stories will end. Fans of historical mysteries or literary ghost stories will love what Rebecca James has created. --Jessica Howard, bookseller at Bookmans, Tucson, Ariz.