The Belladonna Maze
Gothic horror meets modern romance. The historic stream of this dual-narrative novel (actually, there is a short third stream towards the end) is a Gothic tale set in an Irish country house at the time of the Great Famine in the 1840s—a saga of murder, injustice, dispossession, sinister accidents and catastrophe. The contemporary stream (2007) features not an heiress but a young children’s nurse named Grace who works for a holiday company in the Greek islands. One of the holidaymakers, an Irishman who is renovating his rundown ancestral home, offers her a job as his child’s nanny. It is a dream job, but step by step the house’s dark past engulfs the idyllic present.
The paranormal element in the story—two ghosts, one from the 1840s and the other from the 1970s—sits uneasily in a modern romance, but if you can accept this and the implausible climax, you are left with a very readable story and a very credible central character. Like Alice in Wonderland, Grace confronts all these extraordinary events with a sturdy common sense and survives to win the man she loves.
